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 got to the launch early, McDowell’s McMuffin in hand, and watched two little skunks casually walk past my gear while I ate breakfast. I just watched them go by and hoped neither one decided to drive by on my shit, because that would’ve been a pretty appropriate start to the day.

I had a circus of experimental baits tied on from the night before. Unfortunately, somewhere between tying everything up and getting to the water, the entire circus had apparently become a ball of spaghetti. Two of the three baits had to be cut off and retied.

Excellent. Great start.

The Taxi Dock

The Taxi Dock has become my litmus test for the fishery.

It’s right there 500 yards from the launch, so as I’m leaving the basin, I can quickly check it on the way out to start my session. Lately, I’ve spent the better half of the morning having good success there, to the point that when the bite is on, I can let the place reload and I can come back on milk runs. But, if the bite doesn’t produce in the morning, that place is curtains, as the taxi that runs throughout the day in the summer spooks any worthwhile fish out of the general vicinity.

That morning, I kicked out in the near dark and got myself positioned on the dock so I could make one singular cast with a spinnerblade, (yes a spinnerblade) and not only cover the entire length of the dock, but cover several pilings, edges, corners and points, essentially scattering my chips on the craps table.

First cast produced nothing except a good look at what this thing actually looks and feels like underwater, and holy shit, in the predawn light, that blade looks like a wind turbine from Palm Springs that accidentally fucked a Chernobyl turbine fan from 1986.

Those fluorescent blades are ridiculous. And the thing hums.

And I don’t mean “you can kind of feel some vibration” hums. I mean you can feel every spin of the cartoonish sized willow leaf blades working through the rod. The drag on those blades is so heavy that on the first retrieve I honestly thought I’d snagged yet another one of the marina’s discarded Hot Cheetos bags.

Then came cast number two. I got two winds in when I thought I had snagged a cable line, until it started shaking its head. A solid 15-inch spotted bay bass absolutely smoked it. And I hadn’t even turned on the DJI yet.

And immediately my brain went completely off the rails. I thought I had discovered the secret. Except…I hadn’t.

That was the only bite.

And this is a scene I know all too well. Freshwater taught me this lesson repeatedly. I’d get a blowup on the second cast with a topwater bait and immediately decide:

“IT’S ON!”

Then I’d throw that Megabass Dog-X for the next six hours because obviously the fish had just told me something and then proceed to catch nothing.

So naturally, this time, I spent a considerable amount of time throwing the radioactive turbine around that entire dock.

And, nothing. Of course.

Eventually I picked up the Jika rig. That thing will get bit there if the fish are there.

It didn’t.

The Taxi Dock had spoken.

Yesterday, apparently, the fish weren’t home.

Sometimes the Fish Aren’t Where You Think They Are

I swung over to the LMU kayaking team dock, which is usually good for a bite or two. Surprisingly, nobody was there looking for breakfast.

Unfortunately, my breakfast was looking to evict yesterday’s dinner. My stomach started rumbling, and I had two options. I could kick out into the enormous expanse of the marina, roll the dice, and potentially shit my pants. Or I could kick back to the launch, which is within eyesight, use the bathroom, and come back out with clean pants.

I decided that shitting my pants wasn’t on the Bingo card that day, so I kicked back, came out 10 pounds lighter, and apparently a sane man, because I immediately cut off all the experimental shit I’d tied on the night before. Enough of that shit.

The non existent tide was already acting weird, so I decided to eliminate variables instead of adding more shit to the equation. No need to throw more wrenches into the gears.

I stopped by the Taxi Dock seemingly looking for a second opinion. I did manage another fish there, but the dock wasn’t acting like it’s normal self. That’s the funny thing about that dock. Depending on the conditions, you can catch 20 fish without ever losing sight of your parked car.

Yesterday?

One fish.

Apparently the residents were sleeping in.

So I went looking elsewhere.

Mariner’s Village: As Dead as Mitch McConnell

I did my usual marina loop quickly, picking up fish here and there, knowing that if I’d slowed down and given some of those areas more than two casts, I probably could have convinced the local resident to eat.

But I had blinders on. The GPS was set to the rocks on the inside jetty near Mariner’s Village. I know this place. It’s either on fire or dead as, well, you know. There is no middle ground.

I got there around 10 AM. The last hour had already shown a pretty significant slowdown in the bite, which seemed to coincide with the tide beginning to transition from high toward low, if you could call it that.

But there wasn’t much water movement. It was almost like slack tide.

I figured I’d get there right as the water was beginning to make its push toward the afternoon high.

And I did. And I caught zero fish. On the way in, AND on the way out. Not even a measly peck. Even the Fukushima Ceiling Fan got deployed, mostly because I wasn’t catching shit anyway and I wanted to scare anything swimming within 100 feet from it.

I eventually left that area a little…

pissed.

Then I Went Back to Work

To exact revenge, I started working the outside edges of the docks and made my way back toward the launch.

And that’s when I started putting odds into my favor, and not surprisingly, I started annihilating fish. There were plenty of bites. Plenty of fish. Plenty of opportunities for the fish to remind me who’s actually in charge. A few fish straight-up KO’d me and broke the 14# Sunline, although much of the effort was done by the pilings. I missed plenty of good bites, but when you’re getting that many opportunities, you’re eventually going to wind up on the wrong side of the equation.

That’s fishing.

I also lost a couple of 3/8-ounce tungsten Type 2s, which sucks. But the jig bite continues to be fucking ridiculous. And this is where two pieces of tackle from yesterday really stood out.

The Shimano Maki Rubber

The Maki Rubber looks like…have you seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer designs a car?

Except somebody gave Homer an over engineered jighead, a skirt, an underwire, and for safe measure, a small hammered willow leaf blade attached to it, and apparently told him to just keep adding shit until he ran out of parts, which is probably why I like it. Underwater, all that ridiculous-looking shit actually has a purpose. The skirt pulses, the metal blade spins independently, and the whole thing has a lot more action than its Frankenstein appearance would suggest.

I’ve been working it with a simple, slow pump-and-wind retrieve, keeping constant pressure on the bait. The Long Island of mixed drinks is moving toward me under tension while the spottie is moving in the opposite direction, often considerably faster, when it eats it. And as Newton found out, when those two forces meet, you get a pretty fucking violent transfer of momentum from the fish to the bait, the line, the rod, and ultimately to some dumbshit sitting in a float tube 12 feet above the action. In non-physics speak, it’s like tying some braid to a stationary truck, asking you to hold on tight, and then having someone step on the gas.

I caught a few fish on it yesterday. That’s enough for me to keep throwing it. It isn’t replacing the jig. It isn’t replacing anything, really. It’s just another bait that I bought 20 years ago that’s now earned some more time in the rotation.

And that’s really what I’m looking for with all this tackle experimentation. Not a magic bait. A bait that I bought for X, that I find out later works for Y.

The OG Keitech Custom Trailer

And then there’s this shit. These are the OG Keitech Custom Trailers. The old clamshell-packaged ones. The old SR10 rubber ones. Not the newer soft, gummy-bear-feeling crap that now comes in the plastic bags.

I’ve had these things for years. I originally bought them at a Bass-A-Thon at Angler’s Marine years ago when they lived in their clearance bin for half off. At the time, they were my cheap “weird” trailers. Apparently I was supposed to recognize that I was purchasing something that they’d discontinue a few months later.

These old Custom Trailers have become one of those pieces of tackle where I can actually feel a difference in how the bait behaves. The first thing I notice is the fall. Put one behind a 3/8-ounce tungsten jig and it gets down.

FAST.

A lot of the other trailers I’ve tried add drag. More appendages. More water displacement. More resistance. The jig starts falling like it’s wearing a fucking parachute. In freshwater? You may want that. You may not need that. You may need the stubborn largemouth to inspect the jig and count the number of appendages before it eats. In the saltwater? You want your bait to rocket down through the current and tidal swing quickly to get it where you wanted it to be. These fish aren’t counting appendages.

It’s not that the other trailers won’t catch fish. They absolutely will. It’s just rare that every once in a while, someone makes exactly the perfect bait for what I’m looking for.

The Keitech gets down quickly, maintains the compact profile I want, and survives an absolutely stupid number of spotted bay bass. One trailer lasted me eight or nine fish. They can tear it, but none of the spots I’ve caught have hands. They just can’t seem to chew through the damn thing. That’s a pretty significant advantage when you’re fishing a jig around dock structure and getting hammered all day.

I didn’t say “FUCK” because I lost the fish.

Well…

Okay.

Partially.

It wasn’t because I should have changed my angle and gotten the fish around the piling that was sitting directly in front of my face. It wasn’t even because it felt like a good fish and I wanted to see it. And it sure as hell wasn’t because I lost the 3/8-ounce Keitech jig. That particular jig cost me $2.99 in the Angler’s clearance bin approximately 700 years ago.

I can replace that.

I can probably order another one right now and have it sitting on my doorstep tomorrow.

No.

I said:

FUCK.

Because I knew exactly what was attached to that jig when it disappeared.

One of the old Custom Trailers. A discontinued one. One of the good ones. One that I can’t fucking find anymore. That’s the difference. The jig is replaceable.

The trailer isn’t.

So while that spotted bay bass swam away with my $2.99 jig, what I was really thinking about was one of the last pieces of 20-year-old plastic I’d just donated to a piling. Somewhere down there is a spotted bay bass swimming around with one of my goddamn vintage Keitech trailers in its mouth. And I’m pretty sure that fish has no idea what it’s worth.

The Corn & Garlic Incident

As if all of this wasn’t ridiculous enough, at some point during the day the local marina lady offered me some Zeke’s trout bait, Corn and Garlic. Naturally, I put some on the jig, because apparently after 40 years of fishing, this is where scientific inquiry has taken me.

I smeared that shit right around the 2/0 Gamakatsu jig hook and went back to fishing.

Unfortunately, trout dough bait apparently wasn’t engineered to holding onto a 2/0 hook, so it did not stay on the Gamakatsu for very long. But by then the damage was done. Not only had the scent been all over the jig and trailer, it sure as shit had been all over me too. My fingers smelled like corn and garlic for the rest of the day.

And apparently I attract spectators unknowingly and that’s always fun interacting with them. Two people in a kayak had been watching me and eventually came over to ask what I’d caught. I had no idea they were paying attention. I don’t know whether they were impressed by the fish or just curious about the fucking idiot in the float tube who smelled like garlic corn. Either way, I’ll take the attention.

By about 12:30 I’d already mentally decided I was going home. Of course, I worked the docks all the way back to the launch, which meant getting off the water at 5 pm.

Today I caught fish. Lost fish. Broke off fish. Sacrificed tungsten. Caught two on the Maki Rubber. Used the Fukushima Ceiling Fan. Lost one of my increasingly valuable ancient Keitech trailers to a piling.

Smelled like corn and garlic.

Had spectators.

And then, naturally, I caught a fish on the infamous “last cast before I go home. I probably pissed off the fishing Gods by not making another cast after that. I just called it. A good day.

Not because one bait suddenly became magic. Not because I solved every tackle problem. And definitely not because I caught everything that bit.

It was a good day because I came away with a little more information. The blade might have a very specific low-light role. The Maki Rubber contraption has earned more time. The jig bite is still ridiculous. The old Keitech trailer is apparently made from some classified Japanese polymer that the company decided humanity no longer deserved.

Corn-and-garlic trout bait will apparently stick to anything except the fucking hook you want it to stick to.

And the fish?

The fish are still going to win sometimes. That’s okay.

Oh, and I got a picture of a seal’s nuts.

The Unnamed Marina

Never a dull fucking day.