The Find 🐟

While cleaning out the garage, I found my 9 wt. rod that I have had since the 1990s. I’ve mostly used this rod for fishing the fall bass blitz in Montauk and it has never seen any action in the Pacific Ocean. We moved to LA and it got stashed in the garage at some point during the unpacking and was neglected ever since. I needed to grease the ancient 30 year old reel I had and fix the drag adjustment spring on it and then I could hit the beach. I hadn’t really put much thought into fishing locally in Santa Monica until the pandemic. In California, we’re pretty spoiled with options. We could be looking at the snow capped Sierras 🏔️in the distance while fishing the Upper Owens OR heading out to Catalina and chasing yellowtails. During the pandemic, we started meeting friends at the beach on Mondays - late afternoon to evening. We’d all bring dinner and hang out until the sun set. It was a great thing to look forward to each week and a great way to feel gratitude for where we lived while tuning out the turmoil in the world.

Antsy Pantsy 🏄‍♂️

The problem is, I don’t enjoy sitting still. While I love going to the beach, I don’t enjoy just sitting there. It was great to sit and catch up with friends all those evenings, but I always brought a foamie to catch whatever small waves were on hand as the wind subsided and evening glass off happened. At times, while riding a wave down the line, you could literally see fish through the face of the waves and other times, you’d hop off your board and literally bump into a fish in the water. I made a note to remember to bring my rod next time and figure out what kind of flies to use.

Spookus Maximus 👻

These days, the hunt always starts on the interwebs. I needed to figure out the corbina’s diet, feeding patterns, and behavior and determine what fly patterns I needed to add to my box. My collection was looking pretty sad. I had a few old Clausers in different sizes and colors and a few tiny crab pattern. The first article I read got me super stoked and this was starting to sound like an interesting challenge. Corbina are like the bonefish of the West. You can stalk them from the beach, sight them in the water, and try to lay the fly right in their path. I got a few sand crab patterns, the surf merkin and one optimistically named corbina crack and got ready to land my first fish. The first few times, I’d go on those Monday evenings and the tide was all wrong. The next Monday afternoon/evening on a rising tide after a full moon extreme low was months away. I figure I’d fish anyway since I was at the beach. Besides a few times I could see their tails up above the waterline as they cruised down the beach, I didn’t notice any of them feeding on the crab beds because the tide was never right while I was there. This kind of lassez faire approach unsurprisingly lead to a lot of days getting skunked 🦨. By the end of the summer, I’d caught stingrays, bat rays, surf perch, a yellow fin croaker, but still no corbina.

Football Season 🍂

As September rolled around, the kids ‘returned’ to school and the water temps started to drop. We were getting to the end of corbina season. The closest I’d come so far was sight casting to a pair of beans moving parallel to the shoreline and having one hit the fly, start peeling line, only to lose it when my leader snapped. It was the perfect setup - stalk, sight, cast, strip. I got a taste for the hunt, but didn’t land the fish. I definitely started to feel a little more anxious that I was going to go the whole season and not get one so I needed to up my game. Each geographic region and fish species has a person who is really dialed in. In Montauk, Paul Dixon will put you on stripers. If you’re in NYC, Brendan McCarthy will find fish for you in Jamaica Bay or the Rockaways. I needed to find the corbina guy in Southern California. Turns out, that guy is Al Quattrocchi and he happens to originally be from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. I learned a bunch from this interview with Al Q and checked the tides for the next opportunity.

Season One [fin]😢

As the season winds down, this bonefish of the West still eludes me. There are a number of things I need to work on this winter. Looking at structure during low tides, casting accuracy, and better knots are my top three off season development areas. The more I learn about this personal white whale, the more intriguing the hunt becomes.

Update 2020-12-14

I decided to really nerd out on this and went to a book signing event for Al’s book called The Corbina Diaries. It was really fun to meet Al who was so patient in talking to everyone about dialing in their game even though its all right here in his book.