FISHING REPORT FOR
JANUARY 16th, 2010
Larry, Dennis
and I went to Catalina on Larry’s new Parker 28 on Saturday afternoon to try
and hoop up some lobster before the storm came in. It was a smooth ride out and we were at the island by the low
tide at 4:22 pm. We baited Promar
Ambush, Eclipse, and Danielson nets and had them in for a soak by 5 pm before a
5:22 sunset on a moonless evening. The
standard 100-foot lines were all set in 75 to 90 feet and we had three long
lines down between 100 and 150. Water
temperature was 59.8, the wind waves were down to nothing, and air temperature
was warmer than we expected.
We lost a
weighted, small-float, deep-rigged Ambush to a combination of seal joyriding or
tidal movement right off the bat. We spent some time in a futile effort to snag the gear with a jig that
broke off when we momentarily had it close to the boat in deep water beyond a
steep shelf. This adventure made for a
long initial soak when we picked up the remaining set of nine after 7 pm.
This was my first opportunity to use Larry’s
auto-puller, which is the third generation of a design that Larry has been
testing. It is called the Bagram, after
its inventor-builder.
It consists of a
pipe-framed arm which extends a suspended pulley through which you pull the
line before feeding it around another shaft-mounted wheel and then looping back
up to take in the line from the top of a powered fly-wheel. The large sliding floats are rigged to leave
slack in the counter-weighted tag end of the line. By pulling the float back to the weighted end, you can feed that
length of slack through the wheels before hitting the power switch. This allows you to start the ascent without
yanking around the mainline first and spooking the bugs. At first, this notion about slack turned out
to be more theoretical for me than intended, but I got better. The swift tidal current defeated some of our
program by pulling the float to the lead counterweights on the tag end of the
line past the sliding float
The heaviest
movement of the tide hit about 6:30 pm, which was when it started actually
getting dark. We pulled 7 legals out of
the first set as the tide began running hard.
We also pulled 30 shorts. Three of the hoops had 7 or more in them as
they came over the side. We sent the
hoops right back down as soon as we got them emptied out, not realizing that
the tide was now running much faster than when we had placed them at slack
tide.
We hit the set
again when we noticed that several of the floats weren’t sailing correctly and
seemed to be migrating. Several of the
hoops were not in contact with the bottom as the buoys drifted. The situation
was compounded by seals grabbing the small float above the hoop. They would drag the net out as they tried to
get at the bait. We had one bait cage
get pulled off, but we had a half-size spare cage. The upshot is that until we figured out the situation, we made a
couple of sets that resulted in chasing down mostly empty nets during the big
tide movement.
Until high tide
at 10:45 pm, we had a very slow four hours during which we pulled in one more
legal and 20 more shorts. Shortly after
the high tide slack, we dropped a longer soaking set at 55 to 75 feet, with the
two deep rigs in about 115 feet. We
started getting a few more to keep us stoked on making more drops until we made
a couple of final sets that cashed in on a post midnight crawl. We had 17 legals before we pulled up our
last set after 2 am for two more. We
were too beat to hang out for any more sets and figured 19 was enough. The size ranged from barely legal to four
pounds. We had six nice ones that all
looked over three. We caught well over 50 shorts. There was no obvious
advantage demonstrated in favor of
Eclipse, Ambush, or Danielson rigs on this trip.
Larry’s twin 250
four strokers got us home in about 35 minutes on a calm and clear ride back to
San Pedro.
I got home at
5:30 am with six live lobsters (one short of a limit) in the ice chest. I showered and fell into bed ten minutes
later. When she woke me up at 7:30am, Wendy Jo suggested that I was a pussy for
not toughing it out long enough to bag that seventh lobster, but we invited our
neighbors over for surf and turf anyway.
The kids always
like to see the live ones, but Tommy and Davey grew concerned that we weren’t
doing enough to protect their totally fearless G. I. Joes, who deployed onshore
to bring guns and butter to these uncivilized invaders.
Isaac gave them even more cause for alarm
when he threatened to air drop a couple of the biggest roaches behind our
lines. The boys asked us to pull their
guys.
Fortunately, our brave fighting men were
victorious. They joined with us to
celebrate their conquest and our consumption of the enemy.
These are the
days
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