today eric and i took our boat out for one last fishing trip. we hadn’t even fired up the boat since last december, but luckily everything ran fine (well for the most part). the fishing was pretty pathetic and we were really just going through the motions to say that we did it. we probably had lines in the water for less than 20 minutes total before we decided to call it quits and head back in. for all the effort we’ve put into deep sea fishing over the last few years, we really don’t have too much to show for the time and money we put into the sport/hobby, other than a few huge fish and of course a lifetime of stories and memories.

the biggest problem is that we never really got strong at dealing with the ocean’s rockin’ and we usually had to quit because one of us was seasick. we tried dramamine, bonine, ginger candy, acupressure wrist bands and lately even prescription scopolamine, but all either made us too drowsy, or didn’t work well enough. so with me moving out of town, the boat just having been paid off, and us having had a very short fishing trip, we spent the rest of the day cleaning, detailing and getting the boat ready to be sold. it’ll be sad to see her go, but she served us well.

there’s a bunch of lakes in texas near where i’ll be, so maybe i’ll buy a small fishing boat if i find that i have time, money and the space to keep one. i’ve never done much fresh water fishing, but after all of the expensive and difficult ocean fishing i’ve been through in the last few years, it might be a nice change.

if any of you guys are interested in a 2001 glastron 175 sx fish/ski runabout, let me know, i’ll give you a good deal :)

i’ve always had seasickness problems if i’m out in choppy waters. this has always conflicted dearly with my love of the ocean and fishing. during the summer when eric and i fish every weekend, my sealegs usually get strong enough, but since we’ve both been pretty busy this summer, and only fishing once a month, i’ve been trying the different methods to prevent seasickness.

bonine and dramamine (even their “less drowsy” versions) have always done a good job at keeping me from losing my lunch, but make me so damn drowsy that it makes fishing less enjoyable and ruins the rest of my day because i’m just too damn tired to do anything. in preparation for a catalina fishing trip this weekend, i saw my doctor and got a prescription for scopolamine. A small patch that fits behind your ear, “scope” slowly releases a chemical into your skin that helps prevent the inner ear from thinking you’re off balance. you can leave it on for as long as 3 days at a time, and the best part is… no drowsiness! today i was out on the water for 11 hours and the only side effect that i experienced was dry mouth, and like eric said: “that’s why they invented beer.” for 11 hours, in the galley, on the deck and sleeping in random places, i didn’t get a hint of seasickness and now that i’m back on dry land, i’m feeling just fine, not groggy and drowsy like otc seasickness remedies.

so yeh, if you’re going on a fishing charter, whale watching expedition, cruise, or any other place where you get seasick/carsick/airsick, ask your doc about scopolamine. this is definitely going to increase the amount of places that i can fish without having to worry about getting sick.

this weekend, eric and i took out our boat for some fishing. we hadn’t been out in months and were slightly surprised that for the most part, it ran fine. the last time we had been out we had both become so seasick that we had lost interest in fishing and the boat for quite a while. this time though, we both took seasickness pills and were fine out on the water for more than 5 hours.

unfortunately, eric and i are in quite the fishless slump. i’m not sure what happened, because we used to catch fish all the time. i think what really ruined us was that huge halibut we caught 2 summers ago, and now most of our gear and setup is aimed at fish that big. i think a return to basics might do us some good and bring the joy back into fishing - and catching. in reading fish reports it also just seems like there aren’t too many fish out there right now for whatever reason, but in a couple of weekends we’ll give it another try.

the funniest thing that happened that day though was when a large pelican and an ocean duck were sitting next to our boat waiting for some of our bait fish. the duck got a hold of one and the pelican started chasing it which made us giggle. so being an asshole, i put a live sardine on the pelican’s back and it didn’t notice it, but the duck did and started attacking the pelican. when the pelican saw that the duck stole a sardine from its back and was trying to swallow it, the pelican put its whole mouth over the duck’s head and neck trying to fight for it. eventually the duck got its head out of the pelicans mouth, but without the sardine. we taunted them with a few more fish before moving on to another spot. it was hilarious, but maybe you had to be there.

and here’s a random sight: a seagull standing on a floating, dead sealion

on saturday i played golf for the first time in at least a year, probably more. the weather was perfect, although i ended up getting a lot of sun. cool breezes on a sunny day have a way of tricking you on how strong the sun really is. we all actually played pretty well, and ben won the round (although after the 5th hole i was too drunk to make sure he was counting right =p). hopefully we’ll start playing more often.

on sunday eric and i had these grand plans of some hardcore fishing. we bought a new gps for the boat, renewed our seatow membership and met up at 6am, only to find that one of the trailer tires were flat. we bought a can of fix-a-flat, hoping to salvage the trip, but before we were able to use it, it became apparent that it was leaking at the valvestem (from sea water corrosion i guess), so the fishing plans were scrapped. we took both tires to walmart to have the stems replaced and spent about an hour and a half walking through walmart buying random crap. (eric still won’t tell me why he had to buy 3 plastic spatulas, kinky.) we spent the rest of the morning/afternoon setting up for next week’s fishing trip, and this time next week, there’ll hopefully be a link to fishin’ impossible with an article of the huge fish we caught.

two of my favorite hobbies now have their own kentomatic spin-offs on the interweb.

for all of your long beach inshore and offshore fishing interests, check out www.fishin-impossible.com. this site has actually been up for about a year, but i haven’t really done much with it until now. the site will have my latest fishing logs and stories, and other fishing news from around the world.

for all of your honda s2000 interests, i’m pleased to introduce the s2k blog. this site will be dedicated to the honda s2000, and will focus on installs, upgrades and how-to’s.

i hope you enjoy the new sites, and thank you for all of your support over the last 1000+ posts on kentomatic.com.

hero’s sexy cheerleader, hayden panettiere, recently flew (on an airplane, boring!) to japan to try to prevent fisherman from killing dolphins. a couple of videos that have been floating around the interweb show her and her stoner surfer buddies paddling out to prevent the fisherman’s boat from bringing in the captured dolphins for slaughter. Japan slaughters about 20,000 dolphins for food every year.
so she’s an animal lover, that’s fine, maybe she’s a vegetarian, that’s ok too… but hayden and most of the articles about her protest against the practice of slaughtering dolphins and villify the japanese for doing it. how fucking ethnocentric can you be?

granted, i have an unwavering love for all things japanese, am not a vegetarian, and am a fisherman, but seriously, why does the slaughtering of dolphins for food freak people out? maybe because dolphins seem so smart? pigs are supposed to be pretty smart, and in the U.S., we slaughter about 100 million a year. ben was saying it seems weird, because unlike cows and pigs that we breed to be slaughtered, dolphins are wild… but i don’t see how that is any different than the billions of fish we catch and slaughter every year. anyway japan doesn’t have countless acres of grazing land to raise livestock like we do here in the U.S., and as long as the dolphins aren’t endangered, i just don’t get why it’s any different to us than all of the other animals we hate to kill and love to eat.

http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=90ea8ac4

what should i have expected? this was my off-friday, and eric took a personal day since he had been working so hard so we decided to do a bit of fishing. it was a beautiful day, the boat was running well, the bait barge gave us a huge scoop of baitfish… things were looking up.

we decided to fish the pv area, since the bait barge guy told us that there were lots of calico in that area. when we came outside of the breakwater, the waves were pretty rough, and we were getting thrown around pretty hard, but we pushed on to our spot. we finally found a decent area, anchored up, turned off the engine and as i went back to setup my gear, i realized the bait tank had fallen off! all the baitfish had swam away and we didn’t have any plastics to fish, so we were fucked. on top of that the ride over had rocked our stomachs and we were already seasick.

so we pulled anchor and headed home. on the way back, a tugboat coming the opposite direction, seriously almost flipped our boat when i drove over it’s wake. it was kinda fucked up because i had the wake coming on my left and the breakwall on my right, so there was nothing i could do. instead of heading straight into it and taking on lots of water over the bow, i tried to straddle it, but the second wake literally took us completely airborne.

anyway, next friday the 13th, i’m staying home.

last week was my off friday, so my weekend began thursday night when i went up to ben’s place with eric to play video games and watch commando, one of my favorite movies of all time. we ordered these huge chicago pizzas that cost like $50 and that i just finally finished eating yesterday.

on friday i did some shopping and hit the gym, and ended up seeing a dodgers game. the craziest thing was while i was sitting in f’d up la traffic on the 110, just laid back singing along to some tunes, i look over and the dude next to me, doing the same thing was my dad! wacky. i called him up and we chatted, i assumed he was heading to the ball game too, but turns out he was going to a karaoke competition in downtown la. i guess there’s a big one on the 30th that he’s already bought me a ticket for =p

saturday started at 5am with some mediocre fishing. the weather was good, but my stomach, the gps and the fish weren’t cooperating with me. we’ve recently changed up the area and style we fish, so we have some kinks to work out. we were about 5 or 6 miles off the coast though, so we’re slowly getting out to some real deep sea fishing. as soon as we cleaned up the boat, i met up with dave and we headed up to pv for a bike ride. i took him straight up hawthorne blvd. from pv blvd n., and he cursed me the entire, evil 1.2 miles up. there was nothing but praise for the next 16 miles though. it was some perfect weather and a great ride. afterwards our noses directed us to a bbq at bristol farms and we had some delicious, well earned tri-tip and corn-on-the-cob.

on sunday, i did some more shopping and then met up with ben to work on his car’s air conditioner. afterwards, we met up with mike and lisa and spent the rest of the day at disneyland, which was fun, esp since i hadn’t seen those guys in a while and there were lots of stories to share. we finally ended up at ihop (the only f’ing restraunt in anaheim that doesn’t close at 10p on a sunday), with a wacky waiter that really loved red lobster.

… and now i’m back at work *sigh*

dressing like a pirate doesn’t help you catch fish. go figure. eric and i fished the oil rig off of seal beach for the first time. also for the first time, we made real use of our fish finder and searched/drifted structure that it picked up. for all of our strategy, eric landed the only fish (a nice 13″ sculpin), but we had lots of hits and it was otherwise exciting fishing.

oil rig off of seal beach. looks a lot like the one in the 24 season finale?

arrrr!

on saturday morning, eric and i spent about an hour tuning the boat: changed spark plugs (to autolite: the official spark plug of nascar!), adjusted the idle speed, pulled off the prop and cleaned out the line that got wrapped around it last week, etc. anyway, the boat has never run better. it would fire right away and ran strong the entire time. unfortunately, the wind was kicking up pretty hard by the time we got to where we wanted to fish, and the waves were so huge that as we were driving, the wave infront of us would cut off our view of the horizon. it wasn’t really dangerous at any point, because most of the waves were consistent and rolling, but it fucked with our heads and stomachs and after about 20 mins we had to head back inside the breakwater, where instead of fishing we just lounged around and enjoyed the nice day.

water temps are getting up to the mid-60’s in the marina, so maybe even next weekend we bring out the wakeboard?