Russian Gulch 3/18 Spearfishing from kayaks

I met Dave at Russian Gulch (just south of Fort Bragg) today at two. We paddled our kayaks through an awesome cave to take a short cut to some rocks to the south of the cove. Dave had a depth finder and we found a little dome with a 28 foot peak surrounded by water more like 40 feet deep. We tied off to one of several strands of kelp.

The visibility was outstanding. I speared two nice blue rockfish right off while Dave was still trying to adjust his mask. Dave shot one smaller rockfish so that he would have something hanging from his stringer. After that we chased some nice sized blue rockfish around the bottom but they were deep and spooky, not really presenting us with any shots. We noted several nice abalone on the rocky bottom.

Dave tells me that the site is accessible from the shore (we saw a few people fishing not far from there) and that the fish had probably been shot at before. We got back in our kayaks and circled around to the ocean side of a large rock where Dave noted lots of fishy blips on his fish finder. We found a shallow mount and made another attempt. There wasn't much to the mount, things got really deep really quickly. I made one dive down and spooked a nice sized greenling over the edge of the mount and I knew there was no following. He disappeared into the deep turquoise. Dave and I looked around the mount for only about 10 minutes before calling it a day.

By the way, these were my first rockfish speared, thanks for the experience Dave!

Way to go - good warmup for ab season.   

Asa, that was fun.  Hopefully we'll get out to more productive sites some other time.

Hmm, I take a guy out for his first time spearing rockfish and here's how it goes:  He gets two. I get almost nada.  I smell a rat.  How did you get that name "Ace" anyhow?