First fish of the year. 2/6/08

Finally, I got my first fish of 2008. Well, I've only tried twice, but I usually do a little better than .5 fish per trip. So, here's the gist - one small spottie, on a shrimp imitation. Read on if you want.

I took today off, because it's my friend Michelle's 40th birthday. But she's working anyway. So I thought I'd get out of the house, and put in a real effort to be outside, catch some fish, and just enjoy a day fishing, without having to rush to do anything - like go to work.

It'd been a while since I mounted any kind of decent fishing outing, so I drug out all my fly gear last night, swapped a fast sinking line for a floating line, loaded my saltwater chest pack with flies, tippet, an extra spool with intermediate sinking line, and my digicam, threw my wader, belt, and boots in a duffel and went to bed.

Now my place has fly fishing debris all over it, and as soon as I'm done writing this, I'm going to have to do some cleaning.

I got up around 8 a.m., high tide was at 8:45 so no real hurry. By the time I drove over to Coronado, parked, put on my waders, and boots, got everything in order and walked the few hundred yards to the water, it was about 9:00.

My plan, which unfortunately I'd made some time a while back, was to fish a floating line and a fly called a green zima at a bay-side beach, over some real shallow eel grass. I 've seen this beach so shallow the eel grass was high and dry (not actually dry). Not this morning. High tide this morning was almost 7 feet. Which is pretty high. That made my shallow-water fishing plan a bust. I tried for a while, but never felt like the fly was near the bottom. For a while there were some birds about 50 yards off the beach, occasionally plunging after bait fish. I noticed a few boils from beneath, but not enough to get excited about. I tried a few long casts, with fast retrieves, hoping to attract the attention of some feeding fish, but no luck.

I moved slowly to the south, towards the little bay at the state beach. When I got to the baylet I switched to an intermediate sinking line and a clouser, to be sure I was in the eel grass.

The weather was great! A little chilly, but I was dressed appropriately. The sun was out, and there was very little wind, even at noon when I quit. There were also a lot of bird about; egrets, scoters, willets, terns, and even a redtail hawk, and an osprey. Strangely, there were a few dead birds along the high water line. I think they were cormorants. Possibly a result of the last storm. I don't know.

With the intermediate line, and a small surf fly, I finally enticed a small spotted bass into being my first fish of 2008. He was a little guy, about 9 inches, but he took the fly, and he swam off when I turned the fly out of his lip.

There's nothing that keeps an unsuccessful fishing trip going like a small fish an hour and a half into it. Being that the tidal swing was so big today, in the time that I fished the little bay and caught my little spottie, the tide had dropped a few feet. I thought maybe I'd try the orginal beach, but didn't get so much as a nibble. As a last ditch effort I thought I'd try the extreme inside of the baylet where I've caught some nice fish. By this time the wind was coming up the little it was going to, and this spot is a little protected from the wind, not to mention it gets wind from behind, so if you can control your back cast, and keep it out of the sand, you can often get off some nice, long casts. Again though, this spot fishes better when you can see the shelf, just off shore at lower tides, but today the tide was still pretty high, and it wasn't long before I decided enough was enough.

I have to admit, I'd have been pretty bummed if I hadn't got that spottie, and even that was kind of meager. Over all it was a beautiful day, and a real nice day to enjoy some "nature."