Nobody Voluntarily Drives Anybody to LAX
The first time Lake Skinner punched me in the mouth, I was fishing a club tournament as a guest with Big Ed. Funny enough, I’d end up joining that same club years later, which probably says something about fishermen and our inability to learn lessons.
It was only my second real tournament, so obviously I still believed fish cared about confidence. Back then, I thought tournament fishing was basically just regular fishing, except with more snacks, matching shirts, netting 1 pounders and dramatically more money spent.
By 8 AM, we had around 20 pounds and spent the rest of the day cruising around the lake acting like two guys who had already mentally spent our first-place money. Whenever somebody asked how we were doing, we’d hit them with the classic tournament lie:
‘Oh you know, just five little ones.’
…while trying not to grin too hard. 😀
Naturally, we finished in 7th.
The winning bag that tournament broke 30 pounds and set a new club record because apparently Lake Skinner enjoys making examples out of people who count their chickens too early. Big Ed and I just stood there staring at the weights, somewhere between impressed and offended.
The second time Skinner humbled me was last Saturday.
I drew Dean ‘The Stick,’ which normally feels less like getting assigned a tournament partner and more like getting assigned a ringer, especially when there’s even a slight chance at a frog bite.
Sure enough, ten minutes into the morning, a fish that easily went five pounds detonated on his frog and came off. It was the kind of blow up that immediately makes you start calculating imaginary five-fish weight totals before either of you has actually landed a fish. And with The Stick at the helm, we were set for the money.
We finished 2nd to last.
That’s the dangerous thing about losing a good fish early. It fills you with hope.
And hope, in tournament fishing, is usually just resentment waiting to happen.
And as it turns out, hope remains to this day a terrible tournament strategy.
We weighed in seven pounds and some loose change. To put it in perspective, a few days later a local guide caught a DD there after it missed his frog and ate the jig he followed up with.
One fish.
A fish that outweighed our entire bag by itself, which honestly feels a little unnecessarily humbling.
But, the nice thing about fishing is that even after a truly miserable tournament, there’s always another body of water waiting to convince you you’re not a complete dumb ass.
Which is how, a few days later, I volunteered to drive my brother to LAX.
Now, anybody from Los Angeles knows nobody voluntarily drives anybody to LAX. You might as well volunteer for a free prostate exam from Captain Hook.
His luggage got stacked on top of my float tube in the trunk, and while he flew off to Arkansas to visit my niece, I was launching the Fish Cat Max 5, casually ignoring the warning sign about elevated bacteria levels in the water.
A little feces never hurt anybody, I figured.
Probably, anyway.
The first few times I fished the marina, the pilings felt less like structure and more like a highly organized tackle collection program. The fish knew exactly where to go after getting hooked.
Apparently, I did not.
Every hookset immediately turned into panic.
‘SHIT SHIT SHIT!’
Thumb the spool. Wind. Pull harder. Pray. Break off. Curse. Retie. Repeat.
But somewhere along the way, it all started making sense.
And part of that probably comes from finally slowing down and paying attention to what the marina is actually doing.
The night before, I checked the tide charts like always, although at this point it’s mostly for two reasons:
- How miserable the kick back to Mother’s Beach is gonna be.
- When the spotted bass are likely to go from “biting” to completely suicidal.
It’s not like a bad tide would actually cancel the trip.
Saturday I also finally committed to throwing one of those little Coikes everybody’s been raving about lately. Or, as older fishermen would probably call them, “fuzzy balls.”
I hadn’t caught a damn thing on it in freshwater yet, so this place became the testing ground. The spotted bass out there aren’t exactly known for being picky once the current starts moving.
That’s the thing I’m starting to understand about the marina. The bait rarely ends up where it actually lands.
Out there, the cast is really just the entry point.
The current pushes your line, swings the bait under docks, around pilings, through shadows and little underwater seams I never even noticed when I first started tubing there two months ago. Half the time I’m casting upstream now just so the bait can drift naturally back into the strike zone.
And honestly, my fly fishing background is probably helping more than anything.
I’m basically mending braided line now the same way I would a fly line on a trout stream, trying to eliminate drag and keep the bait moving naturally with the current instead of against it.
The spotted bass set up exactly where trout would too — eddies, current breaks, shadows, ambush points — except instead of undercut banks and fallen trees, they’re using yacht hulls, dock pilings, and whatever other expensive structure they can break me off on.
And unlike trout fishing, there’s a very real possibility your fish immediately wraps your line around something covered in barnacles.
Which is why my drag’s gotten a lot tighter lately.
If a spotted bass wants to break 12-pound fluoro, honestly, my hat’s off to him.
It was Memorial Day weekend, so the marina was packed with every kind of boater imaginable, including the ones who apparently interpret NO WAKE signs as polite suggestions. Their rolling mini-tsunamis kept drenching the seals sleeping on the swim platforms behind multi-million-dollar yachts, something the seals clearly did not appreciate.
There’s something oddly relatable about watching a pissed-off sea lion swim away barking at people on million-dollar boats that just ruined his day.
The cormorants and pelicans were all stacked around the fuel dock like regulars at a bar counter. Maybe eight-dollar-a-gallon fuel was keeping some boats tied up at the dock instead of burning thousands cruising around the harbor.
The last yacht I watched fill up dropped almost $9k in fuel according to the pump.
Must be nice.
Two months ago, Marina Del Rey mostly felt like a saltwater-sponsored theft ring specifically designed to separate me from expensive rigs.
This time, I only donated one.
Honestly, considering the cost of tungsten these days, that practically counts as a fiscal growth.
I’m starting to think fishermen probably need both kinds of days.
The ones where the lake humiliates you.
And the ones where, for a few hours, things finally start making sense.
Not permanently, of course.
Fishing would be intolerable if that happened.
But just long enough to convince you to come back next weekend and donate a little more tungsten to the cause.
