Larry was kind enough to invite me out for some calico bass fishin with him and his friend John yesterday. I met up with him at the ramp at 6am and we went right past the bait barge and straight to leadbetter. After a little puttsin around Larry caught a couple bass, and he and John both caught little barracudas believe it or not. We shot over to the one mile and picked up some more bass and stuff. Worked our way down the line hitting horseshoe rock and carp reef. I did pretty good inside, especially at carp reef. I was "in the groove" for a couple minutes, and at horseshoe rock I thought I had a toad. The fish ran into a hole, I gave him some freespool, turned him around, cranked him out, my rod's bent, Larry and John are standing by.....and it's a side hooked sandie. #####. Ah well. After carp reef we went out to the armpit for some deepwater bassin. This is where John was "in the groove" and got a few fish (Larry was in the groove the whole time, but most noticeably at the one mile...). I could only manage one sandie from the deepwater. Last stop of the day was a little spot Larry stumbled across at the one mile. At that point we had like 23 legal bass or something like that, between the three of us (a pretty slow day for the calico hunter...). At this last spot we rose our catch to 38 (just couldn't get our last two to fill out the even number). It was on. We started makin drifts across this spot, and everytime it was HOOKUP, HOOKUP, HOOKUP and so on... We stayed out like 2 hours longer than we were supposed to, but it was worth it!!! All fish were released, we didn't discriminate on species... All fish were also caught on plastic. We ended the day with the 38 legal bass (sandbass and calico) plus about 25 shorts. Larry had the fish of the day with his 4.5lb. calico. Besides bass, we also caught plenty of johnny bass, sugar bass, those two bacaroos, lingcod (they're "endangered" you know...), sculpin (I got a pretty fat one, and I removed the hook with the tip of my rod, nice...), cabezon... It was a really cool trip. Hot plastics colors were clear/red flake, christmas tree (gotta get those fish in the holiday spirit...), calico hunter special, olive/green pearl, and I got a few on green sardine. The majority of the fish were caught on small baits, 3 and 4 inch, but a few were caught on the 5 inch baits. I had a really good time and hope Larry has more open spots on his boat, very soon...
-Brian