This is the second part of a three-part series.
As I think back on it, Bill and I fished for striped bass as much and probably more than for steelhead and salmon. Since I lived in Marin County, right in the heart of the Bay Area striper fishery, I was the scout, as it were. During the summer, blitzes rarely exceeded three days, with the third a mere shadow of the first two. But if I was fortunate enough to have hit a first day, that night, I’d call Bill. Since he never in his life had a phone, how I did it was to call his neighbor Homer Wilson, who then ran next door to get Bill.
This scenario was unnecessary with respect to the Richmond Bridge, because fish were there every day, May through November. However, at Tomales Bay, Bolinas, and everywhere else, it was an essential ingredient. Only an idiot would drive from Monte Rio to Bolinas without at least some reasonable assurance that conditions were right and some fish were there.
One morning, I went out at dawn on the advice of a local friend. It was July, and bass had been more or less around for a week or so, with sporadic catches. Now the tide was right, which was a big outgoing, so I got there at dark thirty. I fished it out to the ebb and caught four, hardly a blitz, but at least it was something. I sensed that it should be at least the same the next day, and I hoped better, because the tide was even higher an hour later. And the fish were averaging good size. My four were all over fifteen pounds.
“Hey, Bill, there might be a good shot at some stripers in the morning at Bolinas.
Feel like rolling the dice?” “I’ll be there.”
“No need to arrive in the dark. Dawn is fivish. That’s good enough.”
Bill was there as agreed. What else? From the bulkhead, I could see the powerful swirls as the tide poured toward the sea. Down on the beach, it was flowing like a vast river. There were three spin fishermen there, all using heavy lures. Although fast, the channel was never more than four feet deep and possibly more like three. These guys weren’t even fishing, because their lures rocketed to the bottom in about two seconds and then were dragged back in the sand, covered with sea grass and kelp.
I said to Bill, “There’s no competition. That’s at least one thing in our favor. I’ll start here. You go below the third guy. If these guys last half an hour, I’ll be surprised.”
I had told Bill this was a floating-line deal, so we were golden on that part of it. I waded out about ten feet to knee-high depth, and as I was pulling line from the reel, there was a boil, then two, then three right in front of me. Terns were now wheeling and diving, and the first cast was a shorty, maybe only fifty feet, and the next thing I knew, the slack was snapping through the guides, and the reel reached a shriek. Looking down the line toward Bill, who was about seventy-five yards away, I saw him backing up with his rod bent over hard. Boils could now be seen everywhere, and the air was electric with dozens of screaming, diving birds.
“Holy shit!” I thought laughing. “What have we gotten into?”
I carried my fish up the beach, quieting it with a length of driftwood. It looked like it might go twenty. Getting back in the water, I made a somewhat longer cast, not that it probably would have mattered, and I was instantly dancing again. Bill was working on one, too, which I assumed was his second. As I beached mine, one of the spin guys came over to watch. After employing the driftwood, I twisted the fly out and started back.
“Say mister, you mind showing me what you’re using? I can’t get a bite.”
“Not at all,” and I handed him the now bedraggled fly and tied on a new one, which I also showed him.
“Man, I don’t have anything like that.”
And so the next two hours went. Just as I thought they would, the spin guys wandered back to their cars, leaving Bill and me alone with a mind-boggling number of feeding fish. As the tide approached its ebb, we followed it clear to the ocean, where the birds dispersed, then mostly vanished, as did the fish. We’d kept our limits of three each, all of them over fifteen pounds, and released at least another half dozen apiece.
“There you go,” I said. “I was pretty sure we’d at the worst get a couple, and we walked right into a monster blitz.”
Another thing we did at Bolinas was fish the open ocean off Stinson Beach and inside Duxbury Reef out of Bill’s twelve-foot aluminum boat. This was always a pretty low-percentage deal, compared with our mornings in the channel, but it was neither tide nor time-specific, so we could show up at noon, if we wanted.
One day I’ll never forget, we launched using the ramp at the foot of Brighton Street. The tide was low, which meant the exposed reef more or less protected the cove from swells coming in from the sea. We easily made it out through the harmless two-foot surf and got right to it. Rarely, if ever, did we see working birds or surfacing fish out there, so what we did was troll our flies until we hit something, then hang in the zone, making random blind casts, which usually resulted in at least one grab before we had to resume our searching.
After hours of such prospecting, we decided to call it a day and headed in. We had three nice fish in the boat, but that was it. As we approached the ramp, we saw something neither of us wanted to see. The tide had come in, and the ocean swells now swept right over Duxbury Reef and were exploding against the sea walls on either side of the ramp, which itself was awash. We guessed the surf was now at least four or maybe even five feet high.
My assessment of the situation was succinct, consisting of one simple epithet. “Oh, shit.”
Bill’s eyes were scanning the shore for options, but there were none.
Finally I said, “Look, we have to get out of here, and our only shot is to try and get the boat lined up in front of the ramp and let the waves push it up while we guide it.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it.” Bill agreed.
“When we get to the first breaker, we jump out, you on one side, me on the other, we’re going in over our heads, but there’s no need to panic. Just hold on tight to the gunwales, and we’ll try to keep it straight and headed in.”
When we were about twenty feet out and a big wave had just passed under us, I said, “Guess we better go” and overboard we went. The next wave broke over the transom, then washed over our heads, so we got getting wet head to toe out of the way immediately. But the next wave was something of a rogue, I guess, because it forced the bow toward Bill so that now I knew it was going to crash into the seawall. I looked over, and Bill’s hands and head had disappeared. I was concerned, but not fearful, since I was fully aware of Bill’s physical prowess.
Then the next wave lifted the boat, slamming it into the seawall, then turned it sideways. I knew exactly, or thought I did, what was going to happen next. Bill was now on his feet, back to the concrete, gripping the boat. So I quickly got around the bow and back there too. And now we were like two human bumpers.
I saw the next wave coming, but there was no time to do anything but try to hold the boat out from the concrete wall. Fastmoving water is a force to be reckoned with, and the next thing I knew, the boat had us pinned. I had the breath knocked out of me and saw stars, as they say, when my head hit the concrete. The wave lifted the boat and flipped it.
“Get out of there.” I yelled as loud as I could. “Go to the stern.”
Reaching under the bow, my hand found our anchor rope, and I started pulling.
“Push!” I yelled as loud as I could, to be heard over the surf. “Let the boat hit the wall.”
And pretty soon we were in front of the opening and out of harm’s way. Gasping and shivering in the overcast cold summer late afternoon, we picked the boat up and walked it up the ramp and turned it over. Before our attempted landing, Bill had the presence of mind to lash our outfits to the boat, and even though neither was worth a three-dollar bill, there they were. The fish, naturally, were gone, a gift now to the seagulls.
Striped bass fishing in Tomales Bay was from around the first of November through May. There were various theories about why the bass were there and how they came to be there. It’s been clearly demonstrated that during the summer months, when feeding in the ocean, stripers routinely foraged up the coast as far as the Russian River, which they entered if the mouth was open. Likewise, they entered the Esteros, Abbot’s Lagoon, and naturally, Drake’s Bay. So why should they not enter Tomales Bay? The answer is they did, not by the thousands, but by the hundreds, at most.
Some said they were following the herring, while others maintained they were seeking protected wintering habitat close to a place to spawn in late spring. I always subscribed to the latter reason, partly because it made sense and partly because the herring didn’t enter Tomales Bay to spawn until January, at the earliest, and more reliably in February, while the bass appeared as early as late October.
As far as anyone could tell, their wintering grounds were strictly at the extreme head of the bay, ending roughly at an imaginary line from the oyster company straight across to what was then called the Golden Hinde Motel, docks, and boat ramp. This was a rather secret fishery, enjoyed strictly by a small handful of local good ole boys, among them the game warden Al Giddings. I had befriended Al and was considered a local, because I was there every day, even though I actually lived eighteen miles away. So Al helped me out now and then with a few inside tips. Besides, I fly fished, which no one else did, and he liked that, I think.
Anyway, my first experience with it was in the winter of 1956–1957. Giddings and his cronies fished a lot at night, which held absolutely no interest for me. But they fished during the day, too, and I was careful to note on what tides and where.
I told Bill about it, and of course, he wanted to try it. The hitch, if you could call it that, was that November through February was salmon and steelhead season. So our first sojourn was in March. I explained the situation to Bill as I understood it. I was relatively new to this, which meant my information was still sketchy, but I had made it work over the winter.
As the tide flooded, the fish foraged as far up on the flats as was comfortable for them. Then, as it ebbed, they dropped back down with it. The key, I discovered, was to keep yourself in approximately three feet of water. I checked every fifteen minutes or so by dipping the rod straight down until it hit bottom. As far as trajectory was concerned, or starting point, that was strictly a matter of intuition based upon what experience I did have.
We picked our day, or I did. A full tide at midmorning and light winds, this latter being of critical importance. I suggested to Bill that we meet at the Inverness store about eight. On the flood, launching our two boats would be a breeze, then we’d drive to the marina, park one car there, then drive back to the store, hop in, and get to it.
It took us twenty minutes to row to where I thought we should start. I checked the depth. Two feet.
“ We have to row down bay until we hit three. They only use two or less at night.” Soon we hit it.
“Here’s the deal” I explained. “When I’m alone, I drift with the tide, making one cast straight out to one side of the boat, the next to the other, this way I cover a swath about a hundred and sixty feet wide. I look for birds and breaking fish, but not once have I ever seen either one here. What does matter is to pay attention to the water near your boat. If you go over a school, they’ll spook, and sometimes their boils can be very subtle. Same with your fly. The water’s still pretty cold, and sometimes they miss the fly without touching it, and the boil can be almost imperceptible. Since now there are two of us, we’ll stay about a hundred and fifty feet apart. That way, we’re searching a swath a hundred yards wide. If you do spook something, they don’t go far, so stop your drift and cast in a half circle in front of you.” Nodding, Bill picked up his oars as did I, and we assumed the position.
Not more than ten minutes into it, I heard Bill cry out. “Fish right here.” He sat down, worked the oars a few times, then stood and fired a cast. I was rowing as fast as possible when I heard that familiar whoop and laugh as Bill hooked up. Careful not to get in the way, I cast to where I judged he hooked his, and right away, I was on. At his boat, Bill’s fish was thrashing and he was trying for a gill.
“Forget the gills. Just grab the lower lip.” And then he was, lifting the ten-pounder into the boat. I discovered early on that the lip hold was not only easy, but completely secure, and it immobilized the bass, as well, eliminating the need for a gaff or net. Then it was no problem to apply the wood shampoo.
“Beautiful,” I said. “Now let’s see if we can find that bunch again. They don’t spook badly. They just don’t like a boat over their heads.”
Spreading back out, we resumed our sweep for another half an hour with nothing. “Let’s move closer to Millerton Point, a hundred yards or so and back up a little,” I called. So we did. I checked the depth, and we were back at two feet, so we drifted just until we hit three, and then spread out, just like before. About fifteen minutes later, there were boils around my boat and a few wakes taking off.
“Bill!” They’re right here. And he came surfing over. I dropped a cast at one o’clock, while Bill drilled one at eleven. The hookups were nearly simultaneous, the fish similar to the others. Whether or not we had relocated the same school was impossible to say, but I suspected not, because of our lateral move. Not that many bass wintered in the bay, and after ten years, the best guess I had was between one and three hundred. Metaphorically, we were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Bill had a single an hour later, and that was it, a rather typical tide for this sensitive, relatively small fishery.
We fished Tomales many times over the years, and although we rarely got skunked, there were one or two fish days, sometimes seven or eight, with luck, but the average was somewhere in the middle. But there was one day that was different.
It was early December, and I was living at Marconi on the bay. I had taken to leaving my boat at Millerton Point, right where the old oyster fence met it. This way, I was only ten feet from the water at high tide, and due to the prevailing winds, the bottom was gravely, so you could get out easily on the low.
The day was dead calm and unseasonably warm, so I drove over, a matter of under ten minutes, parked, walked across the moor, and launched. There were three boats there. This was out of the ordinary, because I rarely, if ever, saw anyone else on the bay. Other than Smitty, the old boy from Inverness who trolled his lures relentlessly behind what one might call something of a scow.
As I was carrying the eight-foot boat to the water, I saw a net come out, but couldn’t tell about anything else. Frankly, I was hoping for a late silver or an early steelhead, both very long shots, by the way. But it was the most beautiful afternoon one could ever imagine, and I was just ecstatic to be out.
I stayed back a bit, not wanting to crowd anyone, but I was close enough to see Al Giddings in one of the boats. The only move there involved random poke and hope casts out from the boat in every direction. About thirty minutes into it, I had a take and could tell it was something substantial, but I didn’t put two and two together until I’d worked the fish in close and saw the stripes. I lipped it and heaved it aboard. About that time, Giddings hooked up, but he and his partner boated it with their backs to me, so I couldn’t see the fish.
I eased closer, to within about fifty feet actually.
“Hi, Al.”
“I was pretty sure that was you, Russ.
What’d you get?”
“Striper. What about you?”
“Striper.” He reluctantly told me with an air that suggested he’d do anything not to have to tell me. But the sun was shining brightly, and Al was incapable of telling a fib. I didn’t get another hit, but the two other boats besides Al’s each got one. That made five altogether in about three hours.
“Hi, Homer. You mind seeing if Bill’s home?”
“Sure, hang on.”
“Hey, Russ. What’s going on?”
“I’m not absolutely certain about this, but something a little out of the ordinary is going on at Tomales off the north shore of the point. Five fish were caught, all big. Mine went eighteen, and I only glimpsed the others. All over ten, for sure, and Giddings was there. He has his finger on the pulse of that place and doesn’t fish randomly. Want to try it tomorrow?”
“What do you think?”
“We’ll have to use your boat, because all I’ve got is the pram, so we’ll have to go clear around to the marina and then row back across the bay to the oyster company. It’s lost motion and a pain in the ass, but it’s our only option. Pick me at the bottom of my road at Marconi at noon.”
The day was a different one, overcast, with a manageable seven-or-eight-knot north wind. I suppose from the boat ramp to the point it probably was about a mile, which was hardly daunting. As we approached the cove, there were two boats. In one was Giddings, hardly a surprise. Because there were no signs of casting you could see, that meant ghost shrimp, a preferred bait of Al’s.
As we noodled in, far enough away from the other boats to be respectful, I said, “I’m not exactly sure what we should do.” As always, there were no birds and nothing showing.
“I guess we could throw out and just ease around. With the floating lines, we can stop to look and listen without any danger of trouble.”
About ten minutes later and a hundred fifty yards from shore, both outfits got hit at once. Clearly, they were good fish by the feel of them.
“Let’s play them close to the water — maybe we can get away with something,” I suggested. And we did. Backs to the audience and two hundred yards away from them, we slid both bass into the boat.
The wind remained steady enough to move the boat, because there was no current in the cove to confound it. “Let’s cast to both sides and let it take us all the way in.” Ten minutes went by until I felt Bill snap back. He lowered his rod, and the bass swung around to the right. I picked up, turned, and drove one to about where I thought he got the grab, and I was on, too. We were giggling as we went through the same commando boating ballet. Even though we had drifted about a hundred and fifty yards, it was parallel to Giddings and company, so we were still separated by two hundred yards. I was fully preoccupied with what Bill and I were engaged in, but a glance now and then revealed nothing more than figures hunched over their rods. We had no reason ever to troll again, because we never went more than ten minutes without a grab. But we moved around, too. Once, I put us about seventy-five or eighty feet from the oyster fence, and we picked up two, which must have somehow been right in it.
Once, when Bill was playing a fish and I was casting, we drifted to within fifty feet of the beach, and I hit one in a foot and a half of water. And still there was no visible sign that this serious mass of fish was present.
As we began to lose light, as mysteriously as it came upon us, the bite was off. I looked over, and the two boats were gone. We had six striped bass in the boat from about ten to twenty pounds, and while I wasn’t counting, we released at least a dozen others and probably a few more. Obviously, we were back the next afternoon. Ours was the only boat out, not that it mattered, because we never saw a fin, and in the ten years that followed, I never saw anything even remotely like that blitz ever again.
As I mentioned earlier, Frank Allen would fish for anything, anywhere, anytime, and anyway. He was a truly great fly angler, but there were places loaded with fish that the fly rod couldn’t hope to touch. Among these were Raccoon Straights, Alcatraz, the South Tower, Lands End, Mile Rock, and the ocean beaches from the Cliff House clear to the end of the Great Highway.
Frank had become friends with some of the sharpest fishermen around the Bay Area: the Nisei who were the revolving-spool elite. These Japanese-Americans took pride, as did Frank, in being all great casters.
Frank naturally made his own rods from blanks, both fly and casting. He must have had two dozen of each, plus, he had at least an equal number of reels to go with them, everything from trolling models, to squidders, to the most finely tuned saltwater Ambassadeurs.
One of the favorite, if not the favorite shore spot for casting lead-head jigs, was the rocky shoreline at Lime Point, right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The favored tide was a big runout at dawn.
I went there a number of times to watch how the current functioned between the big rock and the point itself. Could one find an anchorage inside the bait casters, where a long cast with a lead line could swing into a fish zone? That was the question. To find out, I launched my eight-foot pram.
Rowing out as far as I dared, because the last thing I wanted was to be a cork swirling out of control under the bridge, I dropped anchor. I had brought along about a seventy-foot rope, because I suspected deep water, but didn’t know how deep. Too, if I had a solid anchorage, I could change positions by letting out more or less of it.
Finally I was as far out as I dared go, and a hundred-foot cast was fully in the current. The water where my anchor was holding seemed to be about forty feet deep, so out in front of me, it was, God knows, sixty or maybe eighty deep, and the tide was boiling along at five or six knots. The conventional-gear casters used white bucktail ounce-and-a half lead-head jigs, which, watching from above, seemed to land two to two hundred and fifty feet out. They waited maybe ten seconds before working them around, then rapidly reeled them back for the next cast. If I had to guess, I’d say they were fishing at twenty feet, give or take, and it would have come as no surprise to learn the water in front of them was a hundred feet deep.
Twenty feet would be a cakewalk in calm water or even in a moderate river current. But this was the Golden Gate, with a full-force tide that boiled and swirled like a watery maelstrom. There were fierce upheavals that couldn’t really affect the jigs, but could easily confound even a lead-core fly line.
I got good swings, but they were too fast, and I was sure I’d have been lucky to reach eight or ten feet. The other thing was, it was not a given that actively feeding bass were always there. And how would you know, since this was not a place where you ever saw working birds or surfacing fish? This was one of the real crap shoots of the middle ground.
The Richmond Bridge was traditionally fished on an incoming tide. But when the cretinous trollers were on hand, they motored blindly between my anchored boat and the bridge, putting the fish down for the duration. So I had taken to experimenting with the outgoing, only to learn that the fish used it just as well, a factoid I shared solely with Bill and Frank.
When I got Bill on the phone, I said, “How about fishing the Richmond Bridge in the morning? Plenty of fish there, but they’re just schoolies about six or seven pounds. The big ones are all spread out from Alcatraz to the gate itself and out on the beaches.”
“Sure, I can do it. Meet at San Quentin?”
“Yeah, sorry, but it has to be at threethirty this time of year. When we’re done, we’ll grab some breakfast in Sausalito, and then I want to show you something pretty off the wall. There’s no guarantee, except that it’ll be different. Make sure you bring the cable.”
“The cable?”
“Yeah, you know, the big guy you built for those deep mahoskers in the Park Hole.”
“What the hell for?”
“You’ll see when we get there, trust me. Just make sure you have it with you.”
In the morning, we launched at the guardhouse as always and rowed out to where the jetty and bridge met.
“I want to go under in real tight, because they’re using the closer lights and we should be able to pick up something right away, and then reposition ourselves ahead of the spook job in our wake.
Bill was rowing, and I was up front, ready to lower the anchor, when I saw them.
“Bill, stop! Look.”
In the green glow from a bridge light, suspended in the translucent water, was a lineup of eight or ten fish, finning on the edge of the shadow. It was eerie, but amazingly beautiful. They didn’t yet know we were there, and we’d naturally have to spook them, but for a few moments, we appreciated their fluid grace.
“We’d better get going Bill. No worries — they’re like that at least out to the fifth or sixth light.”
Because we had swung out into the light, we had to get out into the dark, anchor, and then pay out rope until we were about sixty feet from the bridge, straight out from the first light. We made our first casts in sync, because we knew both were going to connect, and you never knew how touchy they were going to be.
The takes were instantaneous. I had told Bill the first time we ever did this how to handle these fish so you’d never have one go back under the bridge and into the pilings. After the grab, you released pressure, and they’d come toward you and sink to the bottom, a depth of six feet. They did this every time.
Within a minute or so, we had our fish in the boat and quieted down. Without going into the tedious details, we moved out from light to light and at the sixth reeled in and headed in. Dawn had broken over Point Pinole, and we unloaded six stripers. How many more we caught and let go doesn’t much matter, but it could easily have been twenty.
Coffee, bacon, and eggs at the venerable Lighthouse Café hit the spot, and then it was off to see the wizard.
“What do you have in mind?” asked
Bill.
“We’re going to fish under the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s why I told you to bring the cable. It’s the only thing that might work, and I’m not even sure that will. It’s a really long shot, but what the hell. We’ll give it an hour, and it works or it doesn’t.”
Down on the water, Bill lets off some nervous laughter and, actually, I do too.
“Don’t worry, we stay inside the rock just on the edge of the current. You’ll see when we get there. It’s deep. That’s why I brought the extra rope.”
As we row out, I see there are still eight or nine guys throwing jigs out near the lighthouse.
“See those guys out there? That’s the bucket. We can’t go there, even if they weren’t there. It drops off straight down God knows how far. And if you think the current’s fast here, you should see it over there.” Frank had filled me in on this deal. “It’s hard core. But those guys can’t fish here, because the rip is so far out. But we’re only a hundred yards above them, and I figure there might be fish here, too.” “Yeah. I get the point. The seam runs from in front of us straight into the shore in front of them.”
The cable, as we dubbed it, was two thirty-foot sections of lead-core trolling line that Bill had lashed together at about six-inch intervals with thread. I never tried casting it, because it was clearly even a strain on Bill.
“Yesterday, I was paying out miles of backing, jigging it deeper, but I don’t think I was there.”
As Bill was casting, two huge container ships slipped past us, taking advantage of the tide. They were so big you almost thought you could reach out and touch them.
“Jesus,” Bill uttered. “ This ain’t Watson’s Log.”
After fifteen or twenty minutes, I said, “Let’s see if we can slide down a bit. There’s going to be a point where we can’t get any closer, but I don’t think we’re there just yet.” Repositioned, Bill rolled out a cast, then another. As the third reached the end of its swing, Bill set hard. No bottom in this groove, that’s for sure. I got on the rope and moved us inshore. It was a tough go, and Bill had to lean into it. This was the big-fish zone, and clearly this was one. Finally, the bass was in calm water, but deep. It was very clear, however, and now we could see it twisting and thrusting below us until pretty soon it was on its side by the boat.
“Don’t worry, I’ ll get it.” And I reached over just as I had many thousands of times before, steadied the fish by first grasping the leader with my left hand, ready to let go if I had to. Then getting hold of the hook shank with my right, I quickly secured its lower lip with my left. That was it, and into the boat it came. On the scale at Western Sport Shop an hour later, it weighed twenty-six pounds, to this day, as far as I know, the only striped bass ever caught on a fly under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The final part of this series will appear in our next issue, January/February 2015. Subscribers who missed the first part can send us an e-mail; we’ll reply with a PDF.
