Vacation, summed up in two words...BAD FISHING

Well, I got back from the beach on Saturday night and I was so swamped with over 1000 work emails and meetings, that this is the first time I've had to get a blog update going.

I had a great week at the beach. I spent lots of time with my son, wife, in-laws, and my sister's whole brood of kids. The weather was nice. The beer was cold. The only bad thing was the fishing. We got there during the heat wave when it was approaching 100 degrees. The weird thing was, the gulf stream shifted and the water temps were in the low 60s! I think it really stirred up the fish.

I did have a few highlights though. Shortly after by blog post about sitting in the pier with a beer in my hand, my rod almost shot off the dock into the water. I managed to grab it and set the hook. It was hands down the biggest fish I had ever hooked. After fighting this thing and having it run my line on my 10 foot surf spinning rod almost all the way out for a good 5-10 minutes, I finally got a look at it. It was a giant 6-7 foot brown shark. I got him to get to the surface one time and I think he then finally realized that something was wrong. He ran like hell and my 35 lb line couldn't do anything to stop him. He broke me off, but continued to cruise around the area for a good 10 minutes afterwards with his fin sticking out of the water. Needless to say, the swimmers along the docks of their houses in the bay quickly got the heck out of the water. I was in total shock but there's no way I could have landed that fish.

Later that night, I decided to stop by the same spot and take a look. I saw some bait fish busting the surface every few minutes along the edges of the shadows from the docked boats. I thought it might have been some blues so I quickly grabbed my 8 weight and threw on a gurgler. Three casts later I had a fish smash it. He really did not fight too much and I got him to the dock and it was a striper, around 18-20 inches. I was pretty high off the water so I was happy that he flipped in the air, spit the fly and swam away. The only bad thing was, I didn't get a pic. He was my first striper on a fly rod and I have nothing to show for it.

After that, it was days of NOTHING. No kingfish in the surf. No flounder in the bay. The only luck I was having were a few dogfish and one eel from the bay later at night on big chunks of bunker. The biggest of those was a 3 foot sandshark. I did get a picture of him.


That was about the extent of my fishing for the whole week, besides one short flounder in the bay one afternoon. Blah. At least Michael had a blast (Although he still loves to eat the sand!)


I was pretty happy to get home and get a chance at some freshwater fish who were actually around. I wet waded a mile long stretch of the creek behind my house on Sunday and I only brought one fly, the AZ mini-hopper. (You all need to tie some of these, they work on everything!) Even though I didn't find mommy or daddy, their 10-12 inch children were more than willing to com out and play. They still managed to put some bend in the 4 weight.



Before I got, I'd like to personally say thanks to DKile over at PAFlyFish.com for the shoutout on his "Blogs of Summer" post. If you're new to the site, thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoy it and I promise that you'll see lots more tying going on once the fishing slows down in the fall.