Decided to get away and do some solo fishing before work, arrived at the launch around 0545 to an empty parking lot. I setup my yak at home and tossed it in the bed so when I arrived all I needed to do was offload, change and launch, launched to an awesome sunrise. Got to the bait barge shortly after 0600, picked up a super nice scoop of squid and off I went.
First drop gets hit and up comes a lizard fish, second drop gets hit and up comes a sole, third drop goes down and you’ll never guess what it was? I almost decided to just peddle my butt off and head to another spot because I didn’t want to deal with another lizard fish. ehhhh, WTH! I’ll drop again and see what happens. Bait goes down, bait hits bottom, bait get hit and as soon as it was hooked I knew it was a keeper, came in at 31.5”.
I decided to drop another bait while I put the fish away and about 2minutes later……BAMM!! Again, based on the pull I was sure it was another keeper, I decided to get some use out of my new Promar net and saved the fish from feeling the wrath of my gaff. Brought it onboard, this one came in just shy of 26”, decided to release it and move on. Its wasn’t even 0730 yet and I already had to legals, THIS IS GOING TO BE A GOOD DAY.
Moved on to another spot and fished a shelf, as soon as the shelf leveled out WHAMMO! I’m on and this is another keeper, fought it for two to three pulls and it comes off. Went from sonar to gps and followed my tracks again, I get to close to the same area and WHAMMO! DAMMIT!!!! Lost it, AGAIN! Went around for round three and nothing, moved around for a bit and got two other great hits but I couldn’t get them to stick. Ended up landing another two shorts in this area, it’s amazing how much fight the little ones have. When I bring them up I’m like, “You’re the one putting up this huge fight? Really? You’re like 12inches long”
It was right around 1030 and it was high tide so there was very little movement. I was fighting a headache most of the morning, I didn’t bring my lunch badge so I had no aspirin on me. My headache was getting so bad that I was starting to get nauseous. At this point I decided to start peddling in and fish the outgoing tide. On the way in I get a few more hits, two short hali’s, two lizards and another legal hali, this one came in just short of 26”. At this point my headache was getting pretty bad so I decided to call it a day, got my lines up and was home by 1400. Took some ibuprofen, sat in a chair in my garage and took a quick nap.
The weather was great, very little wind most of the day, had a buddy keeping me entertained, sun was moving in and out of the clouds and I brought some dinner home….what more could you ask for?
