<center><font size="1" color="#ff0000">LAST EDITED ON Feb-22-00 AT 01:06 AM (PST)</font></center><p>well, my friend gerry and i headed to catalina for some float tube action on saturday morning. we got to avalon at around 9 in the morning and gerry wanted to float tube just because he's never done it, so we jumped in our tubes. i wasn't expecting much because it was low tide, and i didn't get much either. missed one small fish on plastic, and that was the end of that chapter. i checked with the guy at high tide traders (scotty, i think his name is...?) and his store is right on the waterfront so he can see the bay from his window, and he said bonita have been boiling all week everyday right in the mouth of the bay. so that was cool. unfortunately, they didn't show all weekend. it was probably for the best because there was so much bait in the bay, that it drew in a bunch of blue sharks, so i wouldn't have felt safe with dying, bloody bonita in my float tube. so anyway, scotty (?) also said the fishing had been excellent all week, all the way up to friday. but, the rain came in, and screwed up everything. i guess a 29 pound halibut was caught at toyon bay, and some urchin divers saw a school of 70 pound sebass at memory lane. so, we fished on the pier that night since the wind picked up, and i fished halibut with plastics, and that resulted in one short halibut and a small sculpin. we moved to Float 1 where the express boats come in, in hopes of some grande sized calico bass that are known to inhat this area, but had a whole lot of follow ups, but no hook ups. there were some pretty bright halogen street lights overhead, and i think the fish were afraid to come up into the light. i'd like to try that spot this sumemr though...rain was supposed to move in the next day (and with it the swell and rain), so we got up early and tried to beat the rain runoff. there's a drainage emptying thing that just pours out muddy nasty water, and eventually it fills the whole bay, so we were fishing in the rain, trying to run away from the muddy water. i fished for calico bass, and had one fish follow all the way through the muddy water, to my tube and boil on it when i lifted the swimbait out of the water. damn. well, i saw a bit of a swell coming in, so we high tailed it out of there, and that was probably the wisest decision on my float tubing life. when we came back out of the hotel room after getting out of our waders and showering and stuff, there were 2 to 3 foot swells inside the bay. they slammed into the seawalls that are like behind the beach, (since it was high tide) and spray would shoot up like 100 feet. it was nuts. locals said they hadn't seen anything like this in a good 6 months. it was so gnarly. we fished the pier again, since we weren't about to go back out in our tubes. the pier has like floats on the sides with ramps that go down to them, but the swell was so big, that the floats would rise up, almost level with the pier, and bump into the pilings and stuff, so the harbor patrol had to move all the floats to moorings. the whole pier was rocking with the swells. it was kind of scary, but it was cool. i got a nice whitefish on squid strips. that night it was raining and hailing and windy, but we charged the pier again (the swell died down, but it was still too windy to float tube). i got two short calico bass, and gerry got one. we went inside and dried out after about an hour. it was sideways raining so hard that the water soaked through my pants, ran down my legs and soaked my socks. it was pretty nuts, that was only in less than an hour. we attempted to fish Float 1 again, but it raining even worse than before and the fish were gone, so we didn't fish it too hard and gave up pretty quick. so that was about it. i'd say the average wind speed for the weekend was 15-20 knots with 30-35 during the crazy storms. water temp was like 59 1/2 on saturday, really warm, but when the rain water drained into the harbor, it dropped to like 56. i did notice that there was supposed to be full or close to full moons over the weekend (i couldn't see through the clouds) so that's probably why we caught most of our fish at night. <P>- i almost forgot. huge props to the avalon harbor patrol and sherrif's department and everybody else, for being so organized with that swell thing. i know in the santa barbara harbor if there were two foot swells in there, there'd be chaos. those guys were totally on top of everything. it's almost like they've done it before...