I’m glad to hear you are planning to practice beach launches.

The biggest thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is practicing self rescue. Be sure that you have a bilge pump and practice using it. Just this morning I assisted (in a minor way) with a rescue of someone on a Hobie that started leaking, lost stability, flipped, and was not able to self rescue.

I don’t know all the details, but it seemed like this person had too much stuff on their kayak, was not in tune with their boat enough to realize it had started taking on water, and then was not comfortable enough in the water to pump the kayak out and get back on.

Which downrigger are you installing? When I finished from a Revo/Adventure I installed a little Scotty lake troller inside the mesh pocket on the port side, and that worked well as a minimalist setup.

The issue of intermittent recruitment brought up in that article is an interesting one: in some marine fish populations practically all of the larva die most years, but every once in a while the currents, plankton, temperatures, etc. line up right and a large number of larva survive. Over a 30 year period, most of the fish may have come from a single good year. In this type of scenario having long-lived spawners is important. Here is one example: https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/71/8/2088/749525?login=true

I admire the spirit, but a VHF is so cheap (and generally useful) that going far from shore without one is not smart. And even the cheapest smartphone in a $5 waterproof case can run a free GPS app.

I think it is legal and would work. 

Intriguing. Have anchovies been hitting the sabiki with the heavy main line reliably? Sometimes they seem quite skittish.

Sold. Christian has probably already re-cast them and caught fish with them.