We drove down to la jolla at 3:30 w/ our poles hanging out the rear center window of my tacoma. Around 3:50, we heard spectra coming off one of the reels, my friend Aaron's MXJ. "*^&%" !!!!
I looked in the rear view mirror and couldn't believe what I saw- around a 250 foot top shot flying in the air behind us in a loop (since the pole was already set up). The lever drag must have gotten knocked as Aaron was putting in the poles. Apparently the line rarely touched the ground, because it was still in decent condition after he reeled it back in (as we were driving down the freeway)
Now that we were awake, we launched our double peddler at an extreme low tide-virtually no waves and a huge beach. The sand is still firm at the entrance-no need for the wood blocks. In close there was still red tide, but the point and all other major fishing areas were clean. We went to pier and made around a dozen candy-sized bait fairly easily and headed towards off the condo. On the way we saw a thresher and caught a 4lb Sand Bass. As we were arriving, Aaron got picked up by something which maimed his mac, but didn't stick. Aaron trolled w/ a 2oz slider, while I fly-lined my mac.
We headed in a little and began to troll around 100 yards from the kelp and I hooked up (or so I thought) around 8am. The fish swims towards us and as I took up the slack I noticed that my line leads only about 15 feet away, where I see the tail of a decent sized yellow, which immediately let go of the bait. Turns out it had short-bit the bait and had never actually gotten hooked... Around an hour and a half later my click sounds again...this time something takes off straight for the kelp, probably a WSB. I was slow reacting because I wanted the fish to swallow the bait instead of repeating what had happened earlier. Anyways, I tried to work the fish out of the help for around 30 minutes, with the rod tip continuing to jitter. I really wish I'd had my snorkle, fins, and gun.....
I eventually gave the fish the big pull and the hook popped.
A little later, Aaron got picked up again, but again only reeled in a maimed bait. We tried waiting 5, 10, 15 seconds-all to no avail. I guess we just had really bad luck. We also caught a couple legal cuda and some decent calicos (released). Around 10:00 our bait tank battery died...leaving me to hand-circulate the water with a vitamin-water bottle. In the afternoon, I talked to an experienced diver who'd seen 5 WSB and shot one, a 25-30 pounder. The wsb are definitely out there right now. Overall, an unforunate yet still fun day of fishing. We'll be there again next weekend trying to reverse our luck.
The bass are bigger than the photos show. The calicos were around 2 1/2 pounds each...