Slow but quality

[Fiskadoro]

Short version:

Fished La Jolla Thursday for a slow pick type bite. 5 hours on the road, 14 hours on the water, two bites, two quality fish.

Long Version:

Since my trip last week when I farmed two fish I was really dieing to get back to La Jolla and fish Yellowtail. After four trips I was just beginning to get a feel for the place. The signs looked so good last time, that I really felt I had to get back down there, but the deal is I'm in LA so it's a real trip and time expenditure for me.

Some things in the shop kept me away but I finally worked out a fishing window for Thursday. I got all my gear together and made a few calls.

My last trip the fish were working Macks way outside, turns out in the meantime squid had come in, and the fish had moved in with it. I already had missed the bite and the siegners were taking their toll. It definitely sounded like it was slowing down, but I figured there was still some good fish around I should take the shot if I could.

Since the fish were on squid the plan was to leave early get there in the dark, that would give me time to make some squid for what I was told would be a short lived gray light bite at best. For me to get there early I have to leave here around 2:30AM. So I went to bed around nine-sh and lay there looking at the ceiling for a few hours. 48 years old and I still can't sleep before trips...

About 1:30 I climbed out of bed and was on the road around 2:30. I got to the beach about 4:30 and the shelf south of the canyon was lit up like a over sized Christmas tree.

I set up and waded out into the surf then found it very hard to judge the waves do to the glare of the boats outside. I was also a little impatient, because I really wanted to make bait before first light. To save time I had decided to go out gear up rods out, something I do not like to do, and I almost got screwed. Basically I misjudged the surf and caught a 3 footer right after it started to break. Fortunately nothing injured other then my pride, but I did get pretty soaked.

Hey you know what the say: why a kayaker get's drenched in the dark, no-one takes a picture... LOL

So I headed out to the first set of boats and there was no squid just fin fish. About the third boat looked like it had some residual pieces on the bottom. There were a number of yakkers already there using squid gear. They were not getting anything, but it still looked good to me. So I dropped my standard bait sabiki and made a small greenback. Bait is bait.. so I did another drift and got as second one, then a third, and then I got a squid. I then added a glow squid jig to the bottom of my sabiki, and that turned out to be the ticket. I made a squid a drift after that, half on the jig the others on the sabiki until I had a maybe a dozen, all pretty much right on the bottom with nothing but macks in the water column.

By then it was getting light and I started thinking about where to fish. There was maybe fifty boats scattered over a two mile area, most were fishing south and inside of the squid area. I paddled out a little to take advantage of the drift, rigged up my squid rod and then heard some splashing. A group of porpoise were raising hell out in the canyon. Small ones pretty cool. Just then while I was watching them a saw a group of yellows boil up on bait between me and them.

Too far to chase, but they got me thinking. I figured they might just come in on the squid and if so I wanted to be on the outside edge between them and the bulk of the squid so I could get the first shot at them.

So I set up a drift outside, and put down a squid on the dropper. Just for fun I flylined one of the macks as well though I figured it probably wouldn't get bit, with all the squid around. I wanted to get them out of my tank, anyway, I don't like tossing bait, and those Yellows outside probably had been chasing fin bait.

So I'm drifting along watching the rest of the fleet that is south of me and it gets a little lighter, and I notice a light tap tap on my rod tip. I put it in the reel in free spool, pull the rod from the holder, put it in gear, real down to the weight and feel another tap tap. I just reel another turn into it, swing up the rod and I'm on.

Now before I say more I should tell you about the week before. I had found some yellows working a huge mass of spanish macks outside deep. Pretty much every Spanish I put down on a dropper got nailed, and a few of them were I'm pretty sure Yellows but I mostly hooked a bunch of junk fish, bass leopards and several huge 5ft+ soupfins.

Because of that I had scaled up my gear so I was fishing 40 lbs Seagar Fluoro leader with 65 pound spectra on a 20-50 brown fast taper Sabre Stroker that has been cut down on the butt end to five and half feet, with a TLD 15.

This is NOW my favorite heavy Kayak dropper loop set up... LOL


I set up the TLD so that line will just stay on the reel when the drag is just engaged, when the rig is on the bottom, and that gives me maybe ten pounds of drag at strike, which is plenty for the yak. I fish the rod in the holder and when a fish clicks off a few clicks I'll throw it into freespool to get the rod out of the holder then just push the lever to strike and reel into the fish to hook up with the limited stretch of the spectra.

With that Stroker I can put a ton of pressure on the fish but it doesn't make me lean over that much because it's short, ( a leverage thing) and that's exactly why I cut it down, to get more out of it with less work on my end.

At any rate when I hooked up the fish did not take off right away but shook it's head, then went about ten feet then did something weird that to me felt like he rolled up in the line. So I'm thinking: SHARK!!... I got some me some more Soup.

Because of this I really ended up putting the wood to the fish, and did not even clear the deck or get my gaff out, as the thing towed me in circles outside the fleet.

Meanwhile some other guy had started drift right behind me (I gather he mistakenly thought I knew what I was doing) and while I'm messing around horsing on my fish he hooks up as well. So now I'm watching him to see if he's got a yellow on while I'm winching on my own fish.

Next thing I know I look down and see there is this yellow coming up with the head and shoulders of a thirty five pounder. I grab my new mini flygaff with the hays hook, and just like that...in one motion stuck him in the heavy throat section right behind the gills....

Well there you have ... my first ever La Jolla Yellowtail... As they say I'd rather be lucky then good.

Some I'm sitting there with gaff rope and rod in one hand, and digging for my fish clip with the other and my mack rod starts to scream. Well I just let it go. I'm sitting there with what looks to me to be a thirty + pound fish, He's hanging there in the water, my first on a kayak, head up, alive, looking at me, and the hell if I was going to take a chance on loosing him to get a shot at another one.

The mack rod sung out for a good while maybe thirty forty seconds, and the fish must of screamed of maybe a hundred yards of line. Meanwhile I got the clip in the fishes gill and then a rope him, and just when I decided to grab the other rod...it stopped.

I guess even dumb luck has it's limits.

When I reeled the Mack back in it was completely unharmed, and fully alive. The yellow that had it was evidently so big it took the whole thing down whole and spit it out and never even bruised it.

So..... Now what? I hastily put down a new squid and watched the fleet converge on my area. After a while I ran into the other guy who hooked up, and he got his fish as well. So there you have two of three yellows I saw for the day. His was a nice grade of fish though, thrity-ish easy if I had to call it. Definitely looked bigger then mine to me.

Some kayakers came by and one said some fish were taken inside, I never saw them. He then took this picture around 6AM.




Since the fish was very fat for it's length I asked him how big he thought it was. He said twenty pounds.

Now to me the thing had a the shoulders of a thirty five pound fish but I could not argue that length issue and I have called them wrong before. After that I said twenty to thirty when anyone asked. I mean it was as short as a twenty pounder. Hey... and twenty pound yellow was fine by me.

Since he was obviously local I asked him what he thought about the bite.

His take was the bite was done and I might as well go Ice my fish. In fact pretty much everyone I talked to on the water said the same thing.

The bite was drying up, early morning bite, a few fish caught, less every day, dead the rest of the day.

Hmmmmmm...... didn't sound too promising to say the least.

Sometimes I just do things differently then others because I just can't figure anything better to do.

I stuck it out in the area for a few more hours and saw a few Black Sea bass released but those dire predictions of no more fish pretty much came true.

It really looked like that was going to be it, and by 11:00AM the fleet had thinned down to just a few boats.

I seriously thought about packing it up and trying to beat the rush hour traffic back to LA.

My take though was this though. I don't have a lot of experience fishing La Jolla but I have fished a lot of pelagic offshore Yellows as well as Tuna. Often it think those early morning bites have more to do with lighting then anything else.

Peligic fish use there superior vision to attack bait in the low light conditions, and at the same time they have more trouble seeing our lines in the dim light as well. Often offshore I've hooked half my limit of Tuna or yellows right after sunrise, tooled around all day for nothing then caught the rest of my limit within a mile or even feet of the same area I caught the fish in in the morning right before dark.

Additionally the week before it had been dead all day then turned on in the afternoon. My take is since I was already on the water I might as well stick it out. With the X-13's wet well forward the fish would keep and who knows maybe I would get another shot, and lets face it I'm cheap, if I'm going to pay the thirty bucks in gas I want the full trip fish or no fish.... LOL

So I stuck around and by noon the was maybe a two boats still fishing and a no other kayakers. Not a huge confidence builder there. Since there was nothing going on inside and all kind of bird action way outside I decided to head out there and see what's what. I mile os so later I found lots of macks nothing else. By 2pm it was completely dead, and dead calm, and I was getting pretty bored.

Here's an extreme picture of my lunch:



I decided to head back in to the squid grounds and it was like a proverbial ghost town when I got there.



I set up a few drifts and found the squid again, I even made a few on the sabiki..... and then it happened!!!

Yep a sport boat moved in off the Point, hows that for exiting....LOL

(and from what I saw they didn't get anything either)

Yawn!!! I tell I was having trouble trying to stay awake at this point.

So I kept working the area and started making longer and longer drifts out of boredom. At the bottom end of one a lone kayaker came up, and it turns out it's Josh a guy I knew form previous trips. Since I was headed up the line I paddled along as he bounced balled for halibut and we shot the shit.

Without going into details all I can say is..... what a great place to live. I don't envy too many people but I do envy the amount of time he get's to spend on the water there.

As to the fishing his take was it was a morning thing and that is why he was fishing butts rather the the yellows.

Well around four or possibly later I saw a mark on the meter that looked like crossing fish to me. I looked up and two boats had come out and were fishing outside of where I was going to fish. I told Josh I was going to head back to my spot and drops some squid, he wished me luck and I paddled over to the area I wanted to fish.

I went maybe seventy five yards back out towards the canyon, set up on the same area I'd been watching off an on all day, checked out the squid on the meter, put down a bait. May take was the Squid were there eventually the fish would come.

I drifted maybe all of 50 ft when I saw another Tap Tap Tap....... on the rod.

I'd fished all day, other then the flyline which I'm not really counting I had one other bite, and it was a good fish.

It was just a tap..... but my heart went right up into my throat.

I put it in the reel in free spool, pulled the rod from the holder, put it in gear, reeled down to the weight and felt another tap. I just reeled another turn into it, swing up the rod and I was on.

I knew it was not soupfin this time and even if it had been it would of been a new grade of Soup for me. For the first fifteen minutes he really just worked me. I stayed right on top of him and he drug me a good hundred yards. I could often see him on the meter and he stayed right on the bottom for the most part. You know the drill he was trying to find something to hang me up on. Several times I got him up to maybe 20 or 30 feet of the surface and then he sounded straight down to the bottom like my drag wasn't there. A couple of times I was sure that I felt the line rub on a rock or kelp or something else, and as it turns out he actually hung and broke off the sinker.

I personally try not to get too excited about fish, until I have them boat side, but I knew he was big, and I really did not want to mess it up and loose him.

After about twenty minutes Josh called over and asked if he was close, and I yelled back that NO he was not even close to giving up, but the next time I turned him he just kept coming up and I got him first pass with the flygaff in the back of the head.

What can I say... It's just not something that happens every day.

Josh came over and shot a series of pictures, they all are cool (Thanks Josh) but this is the one I really like:



Just a beautiful fish:



So I'm sitting thinking this is my day, I'm on top of the world, nothing can get me down...... Well..... Take a look at how the kayak is sitting in the water, and compare it to the pic above.

Now I'm not holding that fish out from my body or anything. It's too heavy lift and if I did, I'd roll my yak because it would make the yak too imbalanced. That said: with it's weight and the weight of the first fish, and the weight of the full bait tank, and the way I got his weight to one side of my body I've tilted the yak down so far to the port side that the main hatch which turned out to be not sealed is below the water line and it was taking on water.

Maybe a minute two after Josh left to go back to fishing I notice this, and when I opened the hatch I found the yak was over half filled with water.

By now I'm sitting so low that even level the hatch is below the water line, so I'm taking on water big time with it open. I'm not kidding here.... it scared the bejezuzs out of me.

In hindsight it's kind of funny but I spent about twenty minutes with the fish hung over the side, bleeding out, while I'm bailing furiously to get enough water out of the yak to safely paddle in.

All I could think of is if I loose that fish to a seal, or a shark now or sink my yak in the process going in it's just going to kill me.

Finally after dumping the bait tank, sticking the now smaller yellow below the deck, I found that if I held the big yellow between my legs and paddle steady but not too fast I was fine. The X-13 fish capacity.. I just found it out the hard way.... LOL

Hey... but anything that ends with fish on the sand is OK by me, and I though was pretty wore out by the time I got in I was happy once I got on the beach... LOL



When I got back to my shop I weighed both fish on my Chatillon 100 and Manley 50 lbs scale. 29 pounds for the short fatty 41 pounds for the longer one.

Any way you look at it it's was a great day on the water.

Now hears the deal.

Some out there are going to tell you that there is a bite a La Jolla and it's just wide open, but the truth is it's not wide open but actually very slow. Still there is a chance for kind of a long shot on some high quality fish.

It was worth it for me for obvious reasons. I put in my time but I was also lucky enough to get a couple of pickups. Honestly it could of easily gone another way, and most of the time it does. I only saw three caught and got two, who could of seen that coming I certainly did not.

All that said if your looking for a shot a possible trophy size fish and are willing to fish all day for one or two bites, it's not a bad time to be on the water.

Worked for me...

Jim

[T Bone]

HOGS!!!

[Kiyo]

Way to go Jim! Makes the drive home a lot better doesn't it. Congrats!

[bellcon]

congrats Jim
nice way to spend a loooong day

[Iceman]

So your transducer set up really works ..........that is a helluva way to spend the day!! Congrats Jim!

[landwhale]

Congratulations Jim

[Fiskadoro]

Originally Posted by Iceman

So your transducer set up really works ..........that is a helluva way to spend the day!! Congrats Jim!

Yeah the Transducers great

I almost sunk the yak anyway, but that was do to the fish not the transducer.

Jim

[buttchaser]

Congrats Jim ! Great photos

[TheRatYak]

wow! nice ones. the smile says it all.

[Grego]

Nice catches! well deserved for that amount of time on the water! Congrats!

[Dennis]

Congrats Jim. I'm especially digging the lunch!

[Fiskadoro]

Originally Posted by Dennis

Congrats Jim. I'm especially digging the lunch!

Worked for me, damn good burrito

[T-Rex]

Jim,

Great post & congrats on the nice .

[Foamer]

Way to go Jim!
I saw you out there after the first one. Two monsters in one day is heaven.

[PB fisher]

[GHOSTHUNTR]

I've been dreaming about that second fish you got for a long, long time. Nice work, way to be persistent.

[Billy V]

Nice fish Jim, good meeting you on the beach.

Billy V

[THE DARKHORSE]

"Just a beautiful fish:"



Jim, thanks for your patience with the photo shoot, I warned you .

A real trophy that needed to be properly documented, look at that tail, an amazing fish!