Parked in the bike path lot and headed west to the jetties pinpointed by Chris Chan's acquaintance last week. Carried a light spinning rod, my heavy spinning rod for eeling and a bucket of eels.
Good surge in the water from the southwest w/ a 20 knot wind and an incoming tide. Nice rough striper water around each of the jetties and boulders. As I worked my way to the bass stand jetty I cast the spinning rod w/ a small bucktail and picked up a steady stream of schoolies to 20" using my now regular mid summer deep and fast retrieve. Fish were hanging around the boulders as well as right on the beachfront. At dusk picked a jetty, the one Chris's friend identified and started eeling. W/ the surge the further 4 rocks of the jetty were too dangerous so my options were limited to fishing the upwind side or the downwind (and downtide) side. Downwind produced nothing, upwind, despit only having a 10-15 yard range, produced 2 nice pickups and runs as well as a couple interesting little tugs. Each run was your classic eel pickup, w/ my drag set light/non-existant the reel screamed for a 5 second interval. I missed in both as this was my first eeling trip of the year and my timin
g was waaay off.
Never saw either fish, but they weren't schoolies.
I'd still be out there but a thunderstorm blew in and chased me away. Nothing like a 3/4 mile double time march over sand, gravel and jetty in waders and a slicker to get the aerobic workout :-)
L.