The Sea Surface Temperature Chart Friday showed the California Current has pushed warmer water southward, moving massive schools of opaleye into the areas colored blue.  Yes, the latter part of that statement might be slight hyperbole but in years past conditions such as these have bestowed upon TheBreakwall crew full sacks.

    I saw no opaleye included in the sportfishing dock totals from Thursday, but the lack of calico bass in the counts – which were plentiful just two weeks ago – coincided with the cooler water.  However I did notice a Long Beach boat report they caught a bunch of perch.  Could be the fish were misclassified opaleye.  Deckhands think everything with a certain oval, rather flat shape is a perch.

    I was going to meet Breakwall Darryl at the Marineland parking lot at eight o’clock.  However waking up early this morning I checked the swell chart and saw the waves would be four feet and over.  Usually Long Point is too hard to fish under these conditions.  I got going real soon so I could fish Opaleye Point by 6:30, where the swell is usually smaller.  Oh yeah, on the way over I stopped by the Colorado Lagoon slime pit for one scoop of number‑nine enteromorpha.

    At the bottom of the Opaleye Point trail, fishing to the right of the point with the opaleye bobber enteromorpha rig, my first hook-up came by seven o’clock.  It was only worth two tacos, but it was kept nonetheless.

    That was a good start, but casts to several spots around the point by 7:45 produced no other nibbles, so back up the trail I went to meet Darryl at the Marineland parking lot.

    He was about ten seconds behind me.  Together we sauntered down the sandy pathway to our favorite hole just to the left of the Long Point pillar rock, where none of the waves looked too much over three feet.  I chummed a couple wads of the green bait into the whitewater then out went our bobber rigs.

    It didn’t take but five minutes before I had a hook-up; a nice three-taco opaleye in the bag.  Darryl was next.  He knew by the fight the fish had some size to it and sure enough the first two pounder of the season was his.

    Now, I thought here we go.  We’ll nail’em today.  Wrong!  The next 90 minutes produced only one measly one-taco opaleye, which I tossed back.  I wanted to jump out to the pillar rock to cast the Fish Trap to find out if there were takers for swimbaits but the tide wasn’t going to lower enough for me to cross over for another two hours.

    Now that P. V. is too far for me to come just to go home so early, I dragged ol’ Darryldog over to the cave rock.  About all I could say is that we used to catch’em here.  We gave it close to an hour, casting everywhere possible, in the kelp and out, before we decided it’s not going to happen.

*****

From Duggie, fish trip this past September:

Hey, I got yer latest "Breakwall Angler" report.  Very interesting.  Thought I might toss a couple pix yer way since we haven't spoken for some time.  My bro Tom made the trip up here last September for some Fall fly fishing.  We hit several different stretches of river and enjoyed the action.  This one is a nice 15 incher Tom landed on what I believe was a pheasant tail nymph.

This was a fun 16 inch bow that Tom took on an emerger pattern at dusk, on the last night of our fishing adventure.  It took him all over this little run then into some submerged roots.  It kept peeling line off his spool.  He'd walk up to it and it would run and his reel would sing like a scared canary.  We had a blast.

I hooked up this 17 inch monster who took me 200 yards downstream, and peeled more line off my reel than I thought I had.  I'm pretty sure I was into my backing.  As I followed him (cuz I couldn't stop him - I had 2-3 lbs test on my tippet) I stumbled and fell, soaking my shirt and filling my waders and boots with ice cold river liquid.  When I finally got my net around him, my heart was racing and adrenaline coursed through my veins.  Thank god for my Fuji Finepix 4700 digital camera.  A minute after these photos were snapped, he was back in the water, wondering what-tha-*^# just happened.  I was 200 yards downstream from where he first kissed my fly, soaking wet, in a similar state of mind. 

After I watched  him swim off, I packed up my $!#@, and headed home.  I'd only been there 25 minutes, but that's exactly how I wanted to end that week.

Top