i’ll prolly just cut and paste this onto fishin-impossible, but since there’s so little actual fishing involved, i thought i’d post it here.

on saturday morning, eric and i went out for an early/quick fishing trip, since we were supposed to meet ben and costin in la around noon. anytime we do anything under a time constraint, especially something that’s supposed to be slow like fishing, things always go wrong. we set up the boat and headed down to the marina in a quicker than normal fashion, but when we got to the gate (where you have to pay $10), i commented to eric, that we should’ve just followed the person that went through since the arm stayed up for so long. so he gunned it, and as soon as he did the arm came back down on the car. it was funny. we paid our money and got the boat out on the water.

we decided not to fish pv and instead just fish sardines off of cherry beach. the current was all messed up and it kept trying to push us to shore and we’d have to drive back out and follow the drift back in again. on one set, we realized we were way too close to the shore (about 10ft depth) and when we went to crank the motor, nothing, no power to anything. we quickly through out an anchor to prevent ourselves from beaching, and after about 5 minutes of checking out stuff, we realized that a main power connector had come lose. we tightened it and got out of there with no harm, but our nerves were rattled by this point.

with time running out before we had to head back in, we thought we’d try casting plastics and drifting sardines near the breakwater where we haven’t got skunked all year. i did catch a single very small calico to have at least something to show for the trip, but shortly after that as were we trying to set an anchor to fish a certain spot, i was reversing the boat slowly, when out of the corner of my eye i saw an orange flash. eric’s main setup (the nice real we bought for him as groomsman’s gift) had been hanging over the stern and the dangling hook had caught the prop, wound up around the prop and flung the rod and reel overboard. amazingly, as we looked over to where it flew, it was still connected to the prop and we were able to gaff it out very carefully and precariously. we got most of the line off the prop and at this point just headed the fuck home. there’s actually a bit of a knocking sound coming from the prop, which might be the weight somewhere in the outdrive, or a baitfish that i accidently dropped into the exhaust. i’ll try to figure it out this weekend =p

fun weekend. saturday morning me, taka, dave and stella rode down to shoreline village to watch the long beach grand prix. we were going to buy tickets, but we found this great spot on ocean and pine street that overlooked turn 8 which was a sharp 90 degree turn, where the cars go from 130 down to about 70. about every 10th car around the turn would miss it, and go straight into this little turn off area, and have to do a burn-out 270 to get out of it and it was right where we were standing… exciting stuff. we stuck around to watch the pre-qualifying, the drifting and the le mans competition.

afterwards taka and i went to costin’s dad’s 60th birthday party at a romanian restaurant in anaheim. lots of great food, dancing, drinking and pretty romanian girls :)

sunday eric and i went fishing in some pretty rough weather conditions. it was windy which was causing chopping waves so we stayed inside the federal breakwater and fished calico bass and halibut with plastics. we each only came up with a short calico, but had a good time. the main race started while we were fishing, and the f-14 jets did a flyover directly over our boat. i also was able to try my new motion sickness wristbands that put pressure on a special point on the wrist. i was surprised that they seemed to have worked, although we didn’t get a chance to face the big rolling waves outside of the wall.

i stopped updating it at the end of last summer since we hardly did any fishing at all over the fall/winter. but since we’re back at it again, it deserves it’s own blog.

http://www.fishin-impossible.com

eric texted me this morning at 4am asking if i wanted to go fishing, and while it’s hard as hell to wake up that early on a sunday, i was in my car about 15 minutes later. it was a wacky trip. when we stopped to pick up bait, eric stepped off the boat and as he did, his treo 650 bounced off the dock, the boat, and then found the 3″ gap between the two and sank to the bottom of the sea. even though we were out there earlier than usual, we still weren’t able to buy live squid, so we fished sardines and dead squid off the coast of pv. after about 30 mins, i hooked into a 3lb lingcod, which was the only fish we caught between us (and was promptly released… minimum legal size when it’s in season is 24″), but we got a few other solid hits in the spot we worked. after about an hour, the open sea was getting to us, so we spent the rest of the trip inside the breakwater off of san pedro with nothing but a few nibbles.

after we loaded the boat on the trailer and were heading back, we got cut off by this asshole on pch, and we had to brake hard (a.b.s. turned on), which is dangerous to do with a boat that has no brakes. i told eric, who was driving, to pull along side the fool so i could yell at him, and as i called him an “f’ing idiot that needs to learn to drive,” we realized his passenger was a driving instructor :) it was a fitting end to the day, and made for a good laugh.

check out the lingcod’s mouth. it’s blue/green… freaky!

weekend after next, we were thinking we’d do a fishing trip with friends. we’ll probably fish inside the breakwater, unless the weather is really nice and we can try outside. day fishing licenses are about $13, or an annual one is about $40. we also have enough gear/tackle for everyone, so if anyone’s interested, let me know.

eric and i took out the boat for the first time this weekend. the weather was perfect and the water was mild, but we still both got a bit seasick. we ended up spending most of the trip inside the breakwall, off of cabrillo beach, where we caught that monster halibut last year. the boat ran like a champ and while we only caught a single fish, it was great to get back out there.

eric and i were emailing back and forth about going fishing, and google put this ad in gmail for him:

Imagine reaching for an apple on a tree and having your hand suddenly impaled by a metal hook that drags you—the whole weight of your body pulling on that one hand—out of the air and into an atmosphere in which you cannot breathe. This is what fish experience when they are hooked for “sport.”

http://www.fishinghurts.com/index.asp

lol.

now that all the wedding madness is behind us, eric and i spent the entire day working on the boat. we’ve kinda neglected it lately, and haven’t been doing the necessary maintenance. so today we changed the oil (a pain in the ass, because you need to pump it out… there’s no drain plug), changed the spark plugs, added a second battery and a multi-switch, and best of all, we installed flush-mounted pole holders in the gunnels. tomorrow we’re gonna take her out off the coast of PV and start doing some serious fishing. until now, we’ve stayed within the safety of the federal breakwater, but we figure it’s time we go big or go home.

with eric on the precipice of marriage, we went down to sandiego to eat more meat than a colon that would spend the next 12 hours at sea should. we had dinner at a brazillian all-you-can-eat place, where these people walk around offering 15 types of meat. definitely delicious, but definitely pricey and over-filling. it was a good experience.

what wasn’t a good experience was the hotel situation. we booked 2 rooms at the fancy vagabond hotel right next to the sportfishing place we were going to launch from in the morning, but somehow hotels.com, or the nairobian queen running the fagabond hotel, or maybe the fish that were expecting us the next morning, fucked up and we had 1 small ass hotel room for 5 guys. so we gayed it up and got a solid 3 hours of sleep and headed out for the fishing at 5am.

the fishing was decent, there weren’t any huge fish, but everyone was catching, having fun, and no one was puking which is a winning combo anyday. by the time the boat headed back we were all beat, but we had accomplished what we had set out to do.

here are all the pics in a nifty album that brian put together:
http://lemonchicken.com/eric

i bought a super sexy new reel as a wedding gift to myself. i figure i could use it on eric’s upcoming fishing trip, and i’ve been wanting a solid setup ever since i hooked into that monster halibut and my drag was giving me shit. but yeh, the 1-piece solid aluminum frame, extruded gear box (can’t really see it in the pic), milled speed holes, and oversized star drag… sex.

and when we were in harajuku last week, i bought some sexy shirts, and these oh-so-sexy shoes:

i’m not at all surprised to hear he died in the field, but he became such a celebrity that the news of his death still stings. i heard a brief blip about it on some wacky desert radio station as i was driving home from havasu on sunday night and they announced that he had died on monday, so i assumed that meant it happened a week ago, and the news was just being made public, but i had forgot that they are almost a full day ahead of us. yesterday costin had mentioned that when he saw the news and realized it hadn’t happened yet, he called ahead to warn him, but couldn’t get a hold of anyone that would listen.

i know that ads are probably mapped to key words in articles to make them more relevant, but how fucked up is this one?

talk about insensitive.