After driving over 3,500 miles to get to California, I couldn’t wait to hit the water with Hobie Fishing’s Morgan Promnitz. After slipping out of LA traffic and driving another two hours down to meet up with Morgan at his place, we drove down to San Diego Bay to try for a multi-species slam. The original plan was to hit the kayak fishing mecca of La Jolla, but after a series of extra-high tides and a few big storms, the surf was big and the fishing would have been really hard. Instead, we decided to take it a little easier in the Bay.
After unloading the new 2015 Hobie Pro Angler 14s from Morgan’s trailer, we hit the water and started looking for birds. With the recent rain the water temperature of San Diego Bay had dropped nearly ten degrees, but we started seeing bait moving along the surface and saw some birds starting to work deep in the bay. We set up a game plan and pedaled until our legs burned to catch up to the action.
Every time we reached a pod of working birds, they settled down, since we couldn’t make it there fast enough to get in on the frenzy, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t still have plenty of action. Right away we started catching spotted bay bass and after missing a few short strikes from smelt, I finally hooked into something solid. My first fish caught in the Pacific Ocean was a nice corvina, similiar to a speckled trout of the Southeast, (pictured above) which had long been on my list of species to catch.
The weather was a mix of sunny and warm to rainy and cloudy, but it held out for most of the day. The wind too couldn’t make up its mind, as it started off blowing us across the bay at a good clip, settled down during midday and then started churning the waters towards the end of our fishing. We caught tons of spotted bay bass, ranging from micro bass to decent fish, and switched tactics to find the resident bonefish, one of my dream species.
Even after hours of fishing and switching tactics left and right, we couldn’t hook up with a bone, but it was still a great day on the water fishing with Morgan. Catching new species in a new fishery, even a new time zone for me, is exactly what I was hoping this cross country trip would provide and it did not disappoint. When the wind picked up again and we could see rain falling off in the distance, we called it quits and instead went out in search of some West Coast IPAs and world famous burgers in a local California beach town. Now I know why people visit California and never want to leave. The fishing, and the beer and food, are just too good to live without.
