Wednesday, September 21st, 2005
I'm liking this daily fishing outing.. I wonder how long it will last. I thought I'd try flyfishing with the spinning gear this morning, to see what that is like.
The weather at seacliff was foggy, clearing to bright and sunny. I set up my spinning rod with a stainless sliding egg sinker, and the same brace of flies I've been using lately. The surf was fairly calm at 9:15, and the somewhat scalloped beach wasn't producing much in the way of outflow. I walked down to the surfline and cast over the ones I found on the east side of the pier, noticing that the kelp situation got worse the farther from the pier I got.
Casting with the spin rod is fun in its own way, in that the flies go a lot further out. It was pretty satisfying tossing them out past the breaking wave in ways I can't do with the flyline. However, I was also getting tangled a lot, mostly with the dropper fly around the sinker. I think maybe next time I won't use a dropper, or I'll put the dropper farther away from the sinker. Maybe that will help.
I caught a lot of kelp. I even got a few doubles ;). There's some pretty interesting stuff down there. Nice and colorful. On one retrieve I also pulled up a small perch. It was so small that I didn't know it was on until I saw it come out of the water. Four inches, maybe. It had taken the small fly. Great, one fish, but this was my smallest perch yet. I think the fishing gods are teasing me, for not using fly-gear today.
The weather was now clearing to be quite sunny. The surf was so calm sometimes
that I was wondering if I should go get the flyrod. It would have been a satisfying
sort of day for the flycasting. Also, I was snagging a lot of kelp, by dragging
the flies over the bottom. I was thinking that this wouldn't be as much of a problem
with one of the slower sinking flylines. But at 10:10, a few casts later, I felt a
good tug at the end of the line, and had a nice perch on. It pulled hard and turned
out to be a handsome fish, nicely proportioned. It took the Surf Miki.
I cast a bit more after that fish, but didn't catch any more. Feeling satisfied, I went back to the car at around 10:20.
So, yeah, this was ok. There is a satisfaction that I get from casting a flyline that was missing, but it was fun nevertheless.. especially since I caught a nice fish, and also it gave my right hand a rest this morning. I'm going to experiment a little with the setup to see if I can reduce the frequency of the tangles. Maybe I'll think about getting a casting rod, so I can use one of the nice swedish casting reels I have; mid 70's Ambassadeurs. That would add another element of fun to it all.