Mother's Day Fishing Report

Mother's Day, 2013. Dickie called his mom first thing. He's really good like that! In fact I handed a sleeping Marilyn the phone so he could wake her up himself. Best way for a mom to wake up on a Mother's Day to be sure. I called my mother a short while later, and we had a nice long chat as well. Sent notes to my sister, whose three kids took her out buffet-ing the night before to celebrate. Not only was it Mother's Day for her, but her birthday as well!

But this is not a report about Mother's Day. This is a fishing report! We've been here 6 days. Blue Mussels- low tide harvest is a given- all you need to do is show up and pick and cut them off the coastal rocks at low water, clean and eat. We went a couple times ourselves and showed some other folks "the ropes." We've eaten some steamed fresh out of the water and smoked a couple batches in hot chili oil and vac-packed them up for later. We made our first trip to B Street Dock in Crescent City (Northern California) for a day on the crab dock. Thankfully we went with some friends Jim and Georgia and had a really good time....because there wasn't a single crab in sight. NEVER take a banana on a fishing trip? Superstition? All I know is we went all day without seeing a crab..... So the crab count stands at ZERO as of this report- a position that I assure you WILL NOT STAND even if I have to put on my dive gear and go down and grab those little boogers with my bare hands (not that I think it will come to that.) And fish- we have been surf fishing three times already. The first day I got four surf perch and Marilyn practiced her casting. The second time I got two more surfies and Marilyn continued to fine tune her casting skills. And today, on our third time out and on Mother's Day, she struck first with a really big one, then another and another. I caught up at three after a while and then we went into overtime where I managed to eek out one more as the "bite" was on the wane. I wound up with four to her three but in truth she owned the biggest fish of the day! Kudos! Surf fishing is not easy. But once you feel the bite, and set the hook successfully and real in a good fish through the surf- that is a good, no, a great feeling...and she did that all by herself AND took the fish off the hook and dropped it in the cooler. Game on!

In other activities to date, we dropped by a search and rescue training "op" on a cliff near our mussel locale, and took a few nice pictures of "Turtle Rock" and the immediate coastline at our campground which takes its name from the rock- no doubt you will see the turtle.