Palos Verdes 12/3
I arrived at the Colorado slime pit this morning at four thirty, an hour-and-a-half before high tide, even though the park doesn’t officially open to visitors until five. There was plenty of long stringy high quality opaleye algae bait accessible without having to wear rubber boots. This is why fishermen are proponents for year-long daylight savings time. You don’t need to get up so early to, one, flout city regulations to collect bait and two, start casting at first light.
At Palos Verdes’ Christmas Tree Cove, I saw the CDIP Swell Chart was accurate in predicting a two-foot swell. I hiked twenty minutes south to my favorite bass rock and cast the five-inch green WildEye Sardine a little later than I had hoped. It was already light and I thought, gosh, I should have gotten here fifteen minutes earlier. Nonetheless on the fifth cast I hooked up and cranked it in as fast as I could. At first it didn’t feel too big but once the fish neared the rock I was standing on, it applied more vigor and felt of legal size. A wave went out, I stopped cranking and then when the next swell rolled in I again spun the reel handle as fast as I could but it got stuck right at the edge of the rock anyway. I gave it some slack and waited for the fish to swim out but five minutes of trying to free it was unsuccessful and instead of wasting any more precious early morning time, I snapped it off and retied another of the same swimbait.
I walked over to a likely spot a little to the right where I planned on fishing for opaleye later. As I fan cast here and there I felt my lure bumping kelp strands no matter where it splashed down. On the sixth cast inevitably I hooked a strand of the weeds. I held the conventional reel spool steady with my thumb so it would not spin as I walked back to try to free it but the strand was not connected and coming in as I reverted to reel cranking. Once I got it up to the rocks to lift out, to my surprise, it was a two-pound calico bass! I think this is the first one of these species I ever caught in my whole life that didn’t wiggle-waggle once. It was two inches over the fourteen-inch minimum legal requirement and invited over to the house for dinner later.
I spent another fifteen minutes casting the Sardine all over and with no other hits with that, on to opaleye fishing I went.
Today for outgoing tide I picked a rock next to a pebbly beach where I could easily keep my bobber just behind the breakers. After chumming a large handful of the algae, first thing I noticed, there was a lot of foam covering the water. It’s good that this zone is riled up and the water is bringing food morsels from the high tide shoreline to awaiting fish but I couldn’t detect bobber activity while the floater was under all those fine bubbles. I gave this spot an hour with no discernable hits then moved fifty yards over to the left to other likely opaleye habitat.
Again just like previous opaleye trips this season, I had perfect bait, swell, tide but no fish. In the 90 minutes I tried in this zone, I did see my bobber move many times but just barely. I knew it was fish because when I reeled in, my bait was gone. They must’ve been the tiniest of the small.
Around eight thirty I packed up and headed back towards Christmas Tree Cove. Not far from where I was casting, there was one angler fishing not from a big rock but a pebbly beach in highly agitated water. He was using a stone with a hole in it for a weight and shrimp for bait. He was only there for maybe a couple hours but already landed four black surfperch at one taco each and one half-pound opaleye. I congratulated him on his feat and then showed him my three-taco bass. In our conversation he alluded that he has caught many large opaleye right here. I said thanks for the tip and continued on my way. The way I was fishing that first spot this morning was the same habitat as he was fishing. Just behind the waves of a pebbly beach in churned-up water and… nothing.
For the last hour of the day I set up on the rocks at the bottom of the access trail at the back of the cove. Again, all conditions were perfect but no opaleye were around to delight in my chum or suck in my bait on a hook.
I will try again next week and on the 24th, when we will have incoming king tides. High tide and outgoing tide hasn’t produced lately. Why not try the last available option.