Moving along to August- 8/1/14

I simply can't believe it's August.  The kids will start back to school in a few short weeks, and Labor Day is exactly one month away.  It's been a relatively cool summer, in fact the coolest July I can ever remember.  We even turned off the A/C for a few days this week.

I had planned to fish both Friday and Saturday.  The forecast called for 30% chance of rain Friday, 80% Saturday so I knew I had better at least get the Friday trip in.  I was joined by my friend Brian for this one. We launched at 3 pm for the 6 pm high tide.  It had rained lightly all day and of course was raining when we launched.  I had Brian bring me an extra set of rain gear, so we were good.  Wind was about 10 mph out of the east, definitely not my favorite direct for good fishing.  We started by making few drifts near buoy 12.  The wind and tide were moving us pretty swiftly in a northwest pattern.  We were getting strikes but missing most of the fish.  After two long drifts, I had caught 2 decent fish in about 45 ft of water.  This action was not enough to keep me planted here, and besides I wanted to continue on to South Marsh, where I would anchor near shore in try to stir up some other species.  So off we went. to the north shore of South Marsh.

In an effort to get out of the direct east wind, I chose to anchor on the north facing shore of the island.  I'm really not familiar with the depth contour beyond this, and I really need to man up sometime and explore more of it.  I would especially love to venture up some of the guts, I'm told there are deep holes up there holding rockfish.  Any way, while the north shore got us partially out of the wind, I was not able to drift my rig like I did last time, as the tide was not running past like to would have been on either east or west sides.  Bummer.  We managed to put 4 more decent hardhead (11-12 inches) in the cooler, as well as two rockfish, which of course were "big enough".  As the tide changed, and the wind shifted to a more NNE, the fishing never did pick back up.  I was hoping the overcast and light rain would have fired things up, but no such luck. And so, at 7 pm we decided to call it a day.

After Friday I had had about enough of playing in the rain.  The forecast for Saturday was pretty dismal with more rain expected.  And since Friday had been unremarkable in terms of fishing, I opted to not wait around all day and fish the 6:45 pm high tide.  Better fishing or better weather could have swayed me otherwise.  As it turned out, the walloping rain never did develop Saturday, but I only watched it from afar at home on radar.  Oh well,... I am hoping to get back for the next favorable tide scenario on August 15.