Made the long drive down Friday with Lou and Susie, and after epic burgers and Huts-clone onion rings at Chili Willie's, were fishing from the dock by sunset.
Friday night, Chili Willie's was packed with fishermen, and during the days, many boats were running the arroyo out to LLM.
Though we drove south with a tailwind, we had cold air into the mid-40s and dead calm for both Friday and Saturday nights. We drove back north today with a tailwind, too.
Friday night, I got a limit, Lou was short by one fish, and Susie caught 3. Susie had the best fish Friday at 17-1/2".
The score for 3 nights, I got 3 limits minus 1 fish, Lou got 3 limits minus 2, and Susie got one limit plus 3.
I had all these filleted by 11pm.
The normal drill here is fish sunset to about 9pm, take a nap, get back up at 2 or 3am to fish a couple more hours, another cat nap, then espresso and cook a big breakfast.
Siesta and big meal late in the day, and hit it again at night.
Of course we stuck to our calendar-day limits - e.g., if I got up at 3am and caught two more, would limit myself to 3 fish that night.
About half the fish were caught on 2" swim shad tandem rigs, glow in front and blue in back - every fish ate the blue.
The fish were a blast on 7-1/2' XUL rockfish rods, 4-6-lb test.
I caught one fish on 3" blue SS3 swim shad, but the dock light was thick with minuscule minnows, and the the trout were sipping light, arcing upward from deeper water.
Both sitting down on the dock to wait for fish sign, and change up were important - I caught several on the fly rod. Only slow retrieves without counting down would catch fish.
Jerry's right across Marshall Huts Rd. from us had his shrimp flag out all weekend, with great tiny 1"-2" shrimp - you get a bunch in a pint - and the most productive tackle for the weekend was a 3" cigar cork, 4' 8-lb fluoro leader and size 1/0 croaker hook, fished on our XUL rockfish rods.
The long XUL rods are the only way to cast this weightless rig to the edge of the light.
Early morning on the Arroyo.
one of our early-am stringers in the fillet queue
Susie cooked feasts for us - fried fresh spec fillets one night, fried chicken another (she wanted to show it off). Saturday she made a perfect lemon-meringue pie from scratch using Meyer lemons brought from their tree at home.
While Susie was doing her great cooking, Lou and I would throw out head-peeled dead shrimp from the bait bucket or rib pieces from our fillets on the bottom - hoping for something better, we caught the inevitable hard-heads, though we had a good system for handling them using a hook grabber on their spines, and a pair of pliers on the hook.
I also caught a respectably large sting ray, and Lou and I looked fairly pro handling the thing with his barbs flared using the net and a long hook extractor to recover my titanium leader.
It was very pleasant being a dock lizard in the sun.
Our same dock heron fished with us day and night.
Like I said, it was cold in the wee hours Sat and Sun. Lou didn't get up at all Saturday morning - he did join me for a few fish Sunday morning, but said the warm bed was too inviting.
I caught two 17" specs as soon as he left, the first one on the fly rod, and wasn't far behind hitting the rack.
From the weather forecast, I knew Sunday night was going to be the best, with lows in the 60s. There was a beating wind all day, but it was calm again and we lost our stealth cover for Sunday night.
It didn't matter, we had our best night there - Lou and I both finished our Sunday limits, and Susie caught 5 fish.
Here's the stringer.
Lou and Susie holding the stringer
and my trip-fish, 19 inches - a Real Hoot on the XUL rockfish rod.
It filled my Sunday limit, and was a great way to end the trip, other than talking Susie through filling her limit.
didn't really need the shell layer Sunday night, but it was my filleting bib for the whole weekend - and yes, it needs washing.
Posted: 03 Feb 2020, 23:03 • 
