Sunday, September 4th, 2005.
We were out camping at McKerriker state beach & campground, with a few other families, just north of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County. I had some hope to be able to go fishing. As it turned out, I just got an hour in on the beach nearby.
This is the problem with a new place; unless you've done a bunch of homework you don't really know how to fish it, and you'd have to get really lucky to do well. The beach here was a bit steep, and very interesting in that the sand was black and made up of little smooth stones, from 5mm to .5mm, and no dust in the sand. Even the smallest grains were like tiny polished river rocks.
I didn't see any fish, of course. There are probably some rubberlip and rainbow perch up here, but I don't know if there were any hanging out at this beach. The beach was flat; I couldn't find any structure. Lots of ground up kelp by the south end.
Later we visited Glass Beach; an old dump site that now yields lots of sand-polished glass pieces, and is now a well know tourist spot. There were some locals there fishing, for "sea trout" as they called it. They were referring to kelp greenling. (To me, sea trout is the seagoing brown trout, in Europe). This looked like a really cool place to fish.. wouldn't need the waders.. just cast from the rocks into the areas in between the cliffs, by the tidepools. Likely a more dangerous place to go fishing, compared to the beachfishing I usually do, but this particular spot was pretty well protected by big rocks a little further out. I rigged up my floating line, in case the opportunity presented itself, but it never did. Maybe the next trip.
It may be interesting to explore the coastline around Santa Cruz north some more.. see if there are any similar spots to be found. I'm thinking of a rest stop close to Ano Nuevo.