By Marco Pompano, Surf Fishing Guide
Last week, with perfect conditions on the beach for surf fishing, I had a charter with a guy named Tim from Washington State, a retired pathologist. So, we started to fish and it was on. We spent the whole morning fishing, five hours with only one little bite, and we were skunked. It’s just like that sometimes and this was one of those times, so I told him to come back and fish with me again, since he was staying for a month.
The next week, well, this morning, he showed up. There’s a huge cold front coming in for the week, starting at the end of the day today. It seems to me the fish must’ve known this was about to start, because, man alive! They were hungry.
We set up four rods with fleas and crab knuckles and live blue crab. He showed up with some great big clams from Washington State. He used most of them to make chowder and kept some for bait for this outing. But the sand fleas were the ticket. After casting out, we waited about five minutes and chomp-chomp, the rod started putting on some Motown moves and was doing the Shing-a-ling.
I start to coach him: grab the rod, don’t horse it at all, just talk to it, nice and casual like. The way I like to do it is to dance backwards a little. Keep the tension on, and he was up for the task. I played around with his drag and before too long this 26 inch, in-the-slot red fish came onto the beach. Ya, mon!
We set up again and it was time to Bamba. Two rods went off. I took one and he took the other. I reeled in a really nice pompano. He picked up on what to do immediately and pulled in a big whiting. After a while, Tim packed up and left with his fish all nice and bled and cleaned, but it wasn’t over. I set it up again. Four rods with just fleas this time, and like I said, the cold front was just starting and the fish were just biting. After about an hour of hauling one after another onto the beach, I had my limit. Six nice big scout pompano.
I’m still on the beach and the wind is picking up and the temperature is dropping tremendously, so I’m packing up, heading home, putting on the sounds of Third World (the band, in honor of Steven ‘Cat’ Coore), and me and all these fish are heading to the smoker.
