Thursday December 15, 2005
fishing with Glenn
A super-nice morning to be out, despite difficult conditions. Weather was beautiful, blue sky with no wind. Today I met up with zen flyfishing guru Glenn Yoshimoto (grin), to fish the beach together. I have a couple of hours in the morning; he has all day. Lucky guy.
After the initial introductions (Glenn: "you're younger than I thought!"), chatting and looking over each others gear, we headed down to the beach to find some fish together. My leader gets into a nice tangle on the rodtip as soon as I try to get some line out. Geez, how embarassing. I play it cool and deal with the problem, while not not looking over at Glenn so I won't know if he noticed or not.
Big waves out there, and large foamy areas to fish over. The tide was a couple
of hours into the outgoing.
We worked our way north towards seascape, leapfrogging each
other to the unfished water. The surf is kindof rough, and the beach steep
in places. I caught one fish after maybe 15 minutes or so, with an injury
on its back. Wonder what it escaped from.. these guys are tasty, and both
larger fish, birds and sea-mammals dine on them. Not to mention a lot of
fisherfolk.
A little later Glenn had a fish too, followed by me catching one smaller than the first, then Glenn with his second which I didn't notice as I was busy fishing or something. I took some movies, to document Glenn's style. They can be found here: (large 5M and larger 27M files). They give a pretty good idea of what it can be like fishing the surf here, on days when the waves are up. It is a bit of a dance, and a bit like juggling. For instance, the 'having to deal with waves while keeping line in the air' situation, or the 'bigger than anticipated wave coming in, so I let it push me back while I do this sort of crab-walk move to keep upright'. Then there is also the 'waves rearrange the loose line in my line basket' situation, sometimes resulting in a nice tangle on the next cast.
Anyway, fun to be out and have some flyfishing company. Glenn is a gentleman to
fish with, and I was happy that we seemed to be doing about as well with the fishing,
him having a lot more experience on the beach than I. Eventually I had to turn back
to head in to work, but I cast to some spots on the way, hoping to get into that
One Big Fish, but nada. Not even a grab, from what I could tell. Glenn found the
fishing consistently slow through the day, though he did find himself a 13.5-inch
barred perch. Nice! It had a chunk out of its tail missing, so looks like something
tried to eat that one too..
more pics to come.. Hmm.. I'm halfway through the month, and only three outings so far. Not good. I'm slacking, apparently.
Here are the pics that Glenn took.
And all the ones that I took.