I always turn the camera on ten minutes too late, and this is no exception. Mike's previous shad fought very hard, and at the most comical moment the taut line pulled overhead and knocked off his hat! We had a blast fishing for them from the boat. It's a much more stable casting platform than a kayak, obviously. But I had to notice two things: a) we had mechanical problems (not usually a kayak factor) with the fuel line and then the motor hinges, which got a bit bent when we slammed into a log snag at 30 mph; and b), it wasn't really easier on my back and shoulders as I expected. I ended up pulling the whole boat up the anchor line several times, and heaving up a heavy anchor with four feet of chain on it, and yanking the boat around on its bowline at landing and launch time -- all hard work! It will be cake to go back to an inflatable kayak, physically.
This reminds me of the most spectacular osprey sighting: early in the morning on the gravel bar, we saw a big osprey halfway submerged in the water and fighting hard with its wings to lift a BIG fish out of the water. A shad? A striper? It was too far away to tell even with binoculars. There was a lot of spectacular splashing before the osprey finally gave up and flew away.
Not long before going up on this shad trip I got into a lengthy discussion with some guys about how hard shad fight, or don't fight. I think a shad can kick a trout's ass any day, but my cohorts did not agree. Maybe it has been a while since they had a shad double up a 7wt and make a leadcore line hum a low C in the Sacramento current. In any event, we finished the argument with a nod to my religion of "Both/And," which I went ahead and expressed in ritual by adding on a couple of days on the Pit River to give the trout their chances. And the river was fishing fine. I got a 16 inch trout on literally my first cast, and though this is not a particularly notable fish in a river that can (and did) kick out significantly larger trout, I took a photo of him anyway:
These dear unemployed days I do very little other than fish, and when I'm here at home, that means paddling the sea kayak for stripers. I have grown quite accustomed to treating these outings as kayak workouts, and have started going to Point Bonita and other pretty places in preference to the usual scenic striper spots like San Quentin or the Brickyard. Yesterday morning on the bay, I caught a quick glimpse of that great symbol of fishing hope, the osprey, soaring high above the tall gravel piles and cranes. And lo! I finally got a couple of strikes. One fish was unlucky enough to be 19 inches, which means he was big enough to be legal, but small enough to eat without too much mercury terror. He went into "ceviche con mercurio" a few hours after leaving the water, and I want to thank him with all my heart -- he was delicious!
You don't even want to hear how much shad roe I have been eating. Roe on Thursday, striper ceviche on Friday . . . if there were a way to turn a human into an osprey by eating enough of your own fresh-caught fish, I would make it my life's mission. Though I'm not sure it would make that much difference, at the moment.
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