So I've had the fishing itch for a long time now, and seeing as it's a little bit of a drive to any good freshwater fishing spots, I was stumped. Last Saturday was Fleet Week, and as you can tell (dear reader) from post before this that I gleaned quite a lot of info from Denny. So I thought, why not try pier fishing?
So I look up some piers and decide to head out to Coast Guard Pier in Monterey. Line in about 2:55, and within 5 minutes get a small black or blue perch. Within the half-hour I get 5 of these guys, all too small (about 6 inches). Then the Coast Guard people say they're shutting down the pier for about an hour and a half for "flare exercises." We all go in front of the black gates and start fishing. This is when I started talking to Wind, Alex, LaMarque, Terry, and finally Sergio. Got a lot of good stuff from the locals. That's what Stevie G. said: "Talk to the locals!"
Anyway, they finally open the gates and we all go back. We had discussed two different strategies:
1. Casting in the gap between the rocks and kelp
2. Casting over the kelp and letting the tide bring the rig in.
I caught all 6 of my little black/blue perch using the first strategy, and then about 1/2 hour before closing time (the pier closes at sundown), I tried the second strategy, using squid only (I'd caught 5 of the six perch on bloodworms, and the other one on squid). I cast over the kelp, got my line tight, and about 30 seconds later this guy got on:
It's inevitable that you're going to get snagged, but you just have to try to roll with it and watch your line and the kelp, making sure you know where your rig is in relation to the kelp and rocks at all times. This is why (so far) I've seen that only one pole is needed for this type of fishing. The bites can be very small, and sometimes the small fish peck at your bait so much it'd be impractical to have more than one.
The diversity of ethnicities of the fisherman (locals) who I talked to was quite interesting. Here's the rundown:
LaMarque: African-American
Sergio: Mexican-American
Alex: Caucasian
Terry: Asian-American
Wind: Old Chinese Guy (in a motorized chair)
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