Morgan Promnitz at Fred Hall

Usually after a weekend of fishing, I’ll write a post and put it up Monday morning.  Here it is Tuesday and I’m just getting around to putting it up.  Why you might ask?  Well I mentioned in my trip report from Friday how my failure to learn how to tie an Albright knot led to a knot failure resulting in the loss of a jackpot red snapper.  After that incident, I was hell bent on redeeming myself.  Unfortunately, and maybe why it’s taken me this long to write the post, it was more of the same.

Saturday afternoon I headed down to San Diego in anticipation of a great Sunday fishing.  Even though the plan was to only hit the morning half day on the New Seaforth, I was excited to go out because they were going to fish La Jolla.  I’d never fished La Jolla before, but it’s a very unique inshore spot.  A deep underwater canyon just offshore leads to unique opportunities to catch big fish.  During the Fred Hall show last month, I sat in on Hobie Kayak fishing products manager, Morgan Promnitz’ seminar on kayak fishing for big yellowtail.  Morgan’s home fishery is La Jolla.

John A. met me at Seaforth Landing in the morning, we boarded the boat and chugged north to La Jolla.  The crew was RJ driving the boat, Derek and Cody on deck, and Sara in the galley.  Bait was live sardines and dead squid.   The day started out typically enough, fishing in about a 150 feet of water, dropper loop setup, working the bottom.   I tried the ‘dines to start off, but switched to squid strips and started picking off rockfish.  No big deal.  And then I got a big hit!  Big bend in the pole.  After the initial shock and excitement, I settled into a steady wind with eager anticipation of what would show up on the end of the line.  Nice!  A ling cod.  Cody carefully gaffed the fish in the gills and brought him up.  He took the fish and I went back to fishing.  All of a sudden, SPLASH!  What happened?  Cody, “23 inches, short.”  Legal take size is 24 inches.  Ugggh!  Not even a picture 🙁  Big fish ended up being a 2-3 lb. red snapper.  My ling would’ve easily crushed it.

Things went downhill from there.  We ran into a school of yellowtails.  I fly-lined a ‘dine into it.  No bites.  We saw a blue whale…largest mammal on the planet.  I had the camera going as it breached.  Didn’t really show up in the video.

Have you ever been to Vegas and lost quickly?  You told yourself going in that you were only going to gamble what you brought, yet find yourself at the ATM?  You knew you should’ve called it a day, but you chased it anyway.  That’s how I felt about this weekend.  We got back to Seaforth Landing, I had a full sack of rockfish, but headed down to Point Loma to catch the afternoon ride on the Daily Double.  Great to see Capt. Tony, Jason, and Mike, but more of the same.  Shoulda called it a day.  Woulda coulda shoulda.  Big fish was this sheephead caught by the teenage son of a father/son duo enjoying a nice Easter fishing trip.

Jackpot Sheephead from the Daily Double. Check out those teeth!

Try again this weekend.  Headed north to Channel Islands with Jake.   In the meantime, here’s a quick video at the end of the ride on the New Seaforth.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlOXfcInNbQ]

 

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