MBK 7/24/10

Saturday worked out to be the better day for fishing (if not catching), so Ryan and I met up at 5am and headed south to Monterey.  The plan was to troll for halibut along the beach in front of MBK.  Short story - no butt love.  (hey now, getcher minds outta da gutter!) 

We hit the water at 7am.  Conditions were nice...overcast but smooth with little-no wind.  My Outback was sporting sweet new Usagi decals, which I was hoping would bring me some luck.









We trolled for about two hours without a bite.  I tried both whole squid and anchovy on a dropper rig while Ryan was using a crippled anchovy setup. 



No action outside of a few locals who swung by to say hello.  I got the camera out just in time to catch the last one pass by.



After a while I decided to head out towards a small patch of kelp where a skiff had been fishing for an hour or two.  I figured I'd try for a couple of rock fish so that the day wouldn't be a total bust...the skiff guy, however, said that the bite was super slow due to all of the bait in the water (and the dang sea dogs that had been following us all morning, no doubt). 

After rockfishing for a bit I noticed a fish jump off my port side...mack attack!  Figuring that a nice saba dinner would suffice, I quickly tossed in a sabiki and immediately pulled up a nice Pacific mackerel.  The next toss produced a double hookup...in about 20 minutes I pulled up 10 macks total, enough for dinner.   

Ryan had already headed in, so I made my way back to the beach.  Along the way I passed a familiar face who was there as an advanced scout for today's NCKA/A-Hull attack on the beach...



The dinner party...



My attentive audience...



I cooked up the macks following an old recipe that I remember Zee posting a long time ago.  Gotta love the search button.

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php/topic,5116.0.html

I grabbed some fresh shishito from the garden to fry up with the macks, as well as some fresh shiso to go with the uni I picked up at Nijiya.  Add to that a nice cabbage salad (with tomatoes also from our garden), squash donated by a buddy (grill-cooked, in foil with brown sugar, sake and soy sauce) and some Japanese beer, and the long drive to MBK suddenly seemed a lot shorter than it actually was. 

Love the Usagi Furyo sticker!

Those look like smelt to me....

here's a mackerel (top) and Jack mackerel (bottom)

Mooch is correct! Those fish you caught were Smelts.  Thanks for the report and pictures.  Some of them looks yummy 

Glad to hear that you and Ryan were able to hit MBK. I was hoping to meet some of the NCKA brothers out at MBK today, but work was super busy this afternoon. I hope that they all did well today.

Btw, I love your decal!! If you don;t mind me asking, where did you get your decals done? I'd like to put some decals on my yak

nice custom decal !  Where did you order it? 

Yup.  Those are Top smelt.  The second dorsal is directly above the a-hole.  Jack smelt second dorsal is farther back.  Fun to catch on light tackle, especially when you get doubles.

Doh...I stand corrected.     I wasn't sure, and (to me) they seemed big for smelt - all I know is that they were delicious! 

Thanks for the compliments regarding my decal.  A friends/karate student of mine who is a graphic artist did the artwork for me last year.  I just finally got around to getting the decals made.  Because he no longer works at a company that makes this sort of decal I couldn't get them printed for free (dammit).  I went to Fast Signs with the art work and they made me 4 large decals (2 for each yak).  They were freakin expensive...   But they turned out good. 

Unfortunately, I didn't check the size closely enough, and the decals were a little bigger than I wanted, making for a tight fit.  My buddy came over and applied them to the Hobie...I'll probably wait on the affixing them to my T160 until I can figure out where they'll fit.

My buddy is contemplating purchasing the vinyl cutting machine so he can do side jobs like mine on his own.  I told him that he could probably do good business designing kayak decals for NCKA if he did plop down the 1K that the equipment apparently goes for (used).    If he does get the machine I'll let you all know.

The second dorsal is directly above the a-hole. 

Hey now! 
Dang man, you weren't the only one who went buttless this wknd.