Cast Netting Bait

Actually it pisses me off to see that girl throw the net so well although it is sexy... I've found it to be very challenging to throw an open net. Maybe I need to throw like a girl!

Seriously tho, there are definitely bait fish in Alameda but to find them requires some intimacy with the area - lots of nooks and crannys. It's where I live, and whenever I walk my dogs, I'm always scouting the water fronts for little fishes. There are undoubtedly bait fish of several types kicking around. People catch bait throwing blind, but around here one could site fish in broad daylight when there's a turn out, but that's the other hard part: they seem to go away and re-appear. It's not like you can just expect to find the little fish because it works for your schedule. They have their own often inconvenient schedules if you are employed.

As best as I've been able to site it seems an AM flood tide brings some schools into the sloughs (ie. sausel creek outlet) and harbors of Alameda, mostly the various smelt and even anchovies. I've also seen the shiners skittering about under these conditions. Before they closed the Fruitvale bridge pier down (total bullshit), I could easily catch a few large Jack Smelt over a couple hours with baited hook (simple Carolina rig with a strip of squid even on as big as a #2 shitty Eagle Claw baitholder hook!)

The other day I decided to try my hand at throwing a net after observing some incredible action on the surface of the water. This happened to be a couple days after my intro to the method by sharky, who in his words is the worlds worst teacher & has a fairly disabled arm so he throws his own way.

I chucked 500 times at the biggest school of anchovies, and caught zero fish. I was SO pissed! The shoreline can be very perilous for a net to snag on all kinds of junk so it's was a little stressful.

There was also some other sort of school fish in the same spot that day that I've never seen before swimming fast and causing huge rises over an over, and I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what the hell they were. The Anchovies were small, but these other fish were up to 12" long. I thought they could be Smelt but they were moving faster than what I usually see with them, and they were flaring out their large gill plates as they came up appearing to have much larger mouths than typical smelt. Their bodies looked clear (likely an optical effect of the water & shiny skin) with neon features like a red reflective strip down the middle of their sides & some blue shimmers. I threw at them a couple hundred times and caught zero. Ever since that day I have a vendetta and if I didn't have to go to the job I'd be going to that same spot every morning trying to see if there's any pattern.

Come to Alameda and we can try beginners luck together! It seemed like a second person would have been useful to ambush on an opposite side after my net scared all the fish to another spot. They were swimming in a very patterned back and forth motion between one place and another.

Last year I saw bait fish everywhere but only started tracking them beginning in June so don't know when they came around. This year I have yet to see any kind of real turn out besides that day, which was last Thurs. May 21 (2009) between 8 & 11AM. The tide went slack at 11:13AM and that's when things really fired up in terms of the rises. Granted there was a 6'+ bat ray cruising around that was clearly spooking some fish, but this is a 30'+ deep area of water so I don't know what was freaking them out (striper?).  By 11:30PM the fish were almost all gone except for the very small Anchovies that seem to hang around randomly coming and going to this spot rather than racing around like these other fish.