Year End Slaughter On the Water

 Gentle Readers,

This morning your reporter was lucky enough to make a few year end casts for bass on the backside of a high tide in Dana Harbor as the day woke up.
I was listening to Neil Young, because, if used sparingly, his tunes draw bass.  It is cast and retrieve mojo music. I was throwing a white swimbait and managed to land the biggest spotted bay bass of this year (for me) after a spirited battle against capture amidst the rocks.

I released it and immediately racked my lure and headed for the car because I did not want to tempt the fishing gods to smite me for my greed.

This report is not about that fish, even though it was a cool way to start the morning and end the year.

Last night Isaac, Tommy, David and I crewed for Secret Skipper on a year-end lobster adventure into what was supposed to be sloppy weather and big waves.  We almost decided to put it off until Saturday when the weather window seemed more favorable, but we decided we were Gloucestermen and met up with Skipper in San Pedro at 1 pm to prowl the coast for a likely spot to drop our hoops.

It was great to all be out on the water together as we smacked through the lumpy overcast while scanning the horizon for the buttery spots on the surface that would give away crustacean positions for our baits of falsehood to exploit.

This was only the second time that all five of us had made it out during lobster season in all the years we have been sharing hoop dreams together in smaller crews.  The last occasion was epic, as we managed to limit out over the course of a long night of pulling.  This time we made a pact to avoid staying out all night to try and duplicate that feat if conditions did not support us.  There had already been some rain and the forecast was for five foot waves and double digit winds that were supposed to die off as this largely moonless night progressed.

As it turned out, the weather was not all that bad to begin with and just kept improving.

We cut bait, stuffed cages and made our sets by 4 pm against a sunset calendared for  4:54 pm.  It was one of the shortest days of the year in churned up water.  This gave us an early shot at a crawl we would need to last for all of us to cash in.

Since we had a large crew, we all had plenty of help in the routine at the rail and rotated in and out of the lineup.  The entire process was smooth and as close to error-free as we ever get.

Our first pull began at 5:45 pm and was empty, except for a snail.  Then the fun began.  We started getting bugs in nearly every hoop, including shorts that pleasantly constituted a minority of what we brought up.

All depths performed, but the shallows probably had the best scores, including another outstanding production out of our 125 footer, set in 104-107 feet of flat bottom.  It was our last pull of each set and got us to 12 in ten first-set pulls with a game-high three legals.

          Bycatch was very light.  We had a couple of medium spiders, no eels or horn sharks,and little in the way of bait swarms or seal harassment.  

David did manage to briefly detain this curious  hitchhiker that rode up the elevator to our deck.

Our second set put up 10 legals, our third set brought us eight.  We finished off the evening needing one more in a decelerating crawl as we pulled and stacked our gear to get number 35 in 45 pulls.

We did not get any giants, but did get a pretty good grade that featured many close to three pounds and a majority of captives that did not require measuring.  It was back to mostly females and no signs of an active spawn.

We left our spot and made it back to Pedro by 10 pm.  Cleanup was pretty easy with a five man crew.  Your reporter was back in our kitchen a little after midnight, watching in wonder as the boys rotated heaping plates of holiday leftovers into the microwave like coalers stoking a locomotive.

We decided that it was probably our best lobster trip ever as the boys nodded and chomped in enthusiastic agreement while fortifying themselves against the risk of starvation during slumber.

The abundance of what we encountered caused us to attempt to calculate the volume of lobster we could have preserved if we we had the ability to can the tails like Santa does with the coke he smuggles in to keep Christmas white.  We figured at least two cases.

Your reporter quickly hit the rack and descended into visions of ropes and pulleys before waking up to brew a large dawn patrol coffee and chase a favorable tide.  It was another chance to contemplate the morning surf crashing over the Dana Point jetty when that  bass jolted me into turning the handle on a perfect punch-out of my piscatorial timecard for another year.

Today, Isaac and Kyle put the finishing touches on a kayaker's gaff as your narrator prepared the counter for insecticide after the mandatory lobster life photos preserved evidence of our crimes.

We wish all of you a Happy New Year.

May all of us  take this chance to see our friends, have some laughs and look back on a year that brings us to  this annual overlook from which we can see, quite clearly, that

These Are the Days