The Most Expensive Fish Release in Nacimiento History
It was Monday, and apparently Albert already had weekend plans, “Wanna roll with Compa and I to Naci on Saturday?” Does a hobo want a ham sandwich? And just like that, Saturday was spoken...
Southern California Angler Blog
Ghosts, Gimmicks, and the McDonald’s Breakfast Betrayal
It was a gray Halloween morning, and the harbor was full of ghosts, hot dogs, and a guy in a tailored three-piece suit wearing a Richard Nixon mask—all on paddleboards, drifting through the dreary...
A Perfectly Reasonable Way to Spend Your Birthday, Right?
Normally, on my birthday, I was three sheets to the wind. Maybe four. The only way I’d remember what happened the following morning was by consulting my debit card transactions and Uber history. Occasionally,...
The Colorado River Has Seen Some Shit – (Aside from Titties)
There’s a photogenic bend in the river at Parker where red rock cliffs launch themselves skyward from the water, an epic desert landscape billions of years in the making. The Colorado River has spent...
Three Weeks Off, and I Forgot How To Fish Vertically
Fall is in the air in Southern California. Or I think it is. Or maybe it’s just the lingering effects of what was once a fucking hurricane in the Eastern Pacific. I dunno. The...
Man, Fish, and the Eternal Food Chain at Castaic
There’s something primal about catching a smaller fish, putting it on a hook, and trying to catch a larger fish with it. I’m sure back in our caveman days, there was that one caveman...
Well, Shit. We Won.
I was parked on the windy shoulder of the 138 freeway, probably not the most ideal spot for vehicles and trailers to be sitting in the dark. The main gate for the lake isn’t...
The Fukushima Ceiling Fan, the $2.50 Trailer & the Corn-Garlic Incident
There are days you go fishing with a plan. And then there are days you go fishing to experiment. And sometimes, that experiment tells you to go fuck yourself. Yesterday was somewhere in between....
I Finally Figured Out the Damn Seawalls
I launched late, around 10 a.m. No sense in waking up before the crack of dawn on a workday, no less. I have more sense than that. Besides, this was supposed to be a...
2 Harbors, 1 Day (Or 3 Casts, 4 Fish)
Three casts, four fish. That’s not a typo. On that third cast with the Jigpara, I set the hook expecting another spotted bay bass. Instead… …it felt weird. My first thought was that it’d...
Huntington Harbor: First Contact
Mission Briefing People always ask me what I think about while spending ten or twelve hours alone in a float tube. The truth? What does a bird dog think about the moment it gets...
