I never truly enjoyed winter fishing in California. Part of the problem, of course, is that I’m spoiled.
The weather’s so mellow the rest of the year, I bridle at a little hardship. Even Putah Creek, a first-rate wild-trout stream, didn’t work for me. I once headed there in November after my favorite Sierra streams had closed, telling myself the trip would be more pleasant than punishing, but I was wrong. After fighting the cold and hanging up in the bushes, I quit in under an hour. I’m not proud of the fact. I have a friend who swears by the creek, even with frost on the ground, but he’s a better man. Even though I love steelhead fishing,
it, too, can be brutal in the winter. Years ago, I had the Russian River in my backyard, but at times, I still had to talk myself into visiting the stream. Early mornings could be tough. In my trailer, I relied on a wood stove for heat and didn’t dare dress until it fired up. I put on so many layers, I looked like the Michelin tire man, but that wasn’t enough on gray days when the temperature stuck just above freezing. Worse still were the mornings when an icy rain fell. That often triggered the steelhead into moving, so I’d stick it out until the river was too discolored or my fingers were too numb to cast, whichever came first.
The only time I’ve ever been happy to fish in the winter happened not long ago, when I was offered a job writing for an HBO series about horse racing. I needed to relocate to Santa Monica, where my boss had his suite of offices, but any misgivings I had vanished when I saw my first paycheck. If you’ve scrambled most of your writing life, it’s a thrill to settle all the bills and have enough left over to dine out every night. Soon I rented a condo a half block from the beach, started reading Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and felt very lucky indeed.
But I missed those favorite Sierra streams of mine. I must’ve done a fair bit of bellyaching, because my wife, Imelda, gave me a fly rod our first Christmas there, a stand-in for the rods I’d put in storage.
She’s Irish, and though she loves the mountains as I do, the basics of our sport continue to escape her. For advice about buying a rod online, she turned to a Dublin friend who’s a fisheries biologist and a keen fly angler. She was probably a little vague about how I might use the rod, so her friend tried to cover all the bases.
Christmas in the temperate parts of California always feels slightly unnatural to me, and it felt downright weird in Santa Monica, with blinking lights strung through the palm trees and surfer dudes posing as Santas. Everyone did a good job of pretending it was snowing outside, a few folks even donning reindeer sweaters, but it’s a tricky stunt to pull off on a 70-degree December day. At any rate, we bought a tree from the Boy Scouts and installed it at the condo, and on Christmas morning, I found a tubular gift-wrapped package under it with my name on it.
Inside was a four-piece 7-weight rod that was 9 feet 6 inches long. Imelda had bought it from an outfit in Dallas, of all places, and it came with a compatible reel. It was more rod than I’d want for most trout fishing, but her friend knew we lived by the Pacific and must’ve figured I’d use the rod for both fresh and salt water. The gift also included some plastic packets of flies, among them big streamers intended for the surf. I’d rarely done any ocean fishing, but I’d seen fly casters while walking the beach and decided to investigate.
They were after corbinas, I learned, a species of croaker found along the coast from Eureka to Baja California. Corbinas prefer the shallows of the oceanfront surf and forage there for sand crabs, the mainstay of their diet. Known locally as “beans” or “beanies,” they’re also called “the poor man’s bonefish.” You can often spot and sight cast to them. That sounds easy, but the opposite is true. Corbinas are notoriously difficult to catch. They can mouth a fly and spit it out before an angler registers it. You need a light touch and a long leader — 10 or even 15 feet — for any chance of success.
My rod, it seemed, would be a good fit once I added a sink-tip line. But the flies I received were a worry. They looked as if they’d been tied by underpaid workers in a foreign land and failed to be convincing, so I chose to replace them. A shop on the Santa Monica pier sells some tackle, but they don’t carry f lies, although the guy offered to rent me a rod for four dollars an hour, a rather steep tariff, in my opinion. Rather than waste more time, I ordered a “surf bundle” from a shop online, a dozen brightly colored streamers I supplemented with a handful of Clouser Deep Minnows, reported to be especially effective with corbinas.
To dress for corbina fishing, I had no need of a wood stove, a knit cap, or a thermal vest — or even waders. Winters in Santa Monica are balmy, except when a Pacific storm blows through. Mornings can be chilly, but the sun quickly gathers strength, and you can usually count on at least 60-degree weather well before noon. I walked to the beach in cargo shorts and some old sneakers without any fear of the chilblains I almost developed in my steelhead fishing days. I wore a hoodie, too, but that wasn’t an inconvenience.
The winter isn’t the best time for corbinas, I’m told. The spring and summer are better, but that means crowds, while I had the oceanfront to myself. Corbinas are fond of structure, so I set up near a rocky breakwater some three hundred yards from the pier. The flies in my bundle were mostly size 6, with a few weighted size 2s tossed in. I decided on a Holey Moley in shocking pink. Long casts wouldn’t be required; 25 to 30 feet of line would suffice to reach the shallows were the fish did their mooching.
So there I stood the day after Christmas, ankle-deep in the ocean, about to put my rod to the test. I don’t want to suggest the water was inviting. I felt a slight shock to the system when I waded in, but it soon passed. Though I checked for feeding corbinas, I saw none. They often hold in ocean troughs, the dirty-looking water in the splash zone. The waves churn up the sand and dislodge the crabs, so I began casting to troughs, making sure to get the fly down. My rod felt right for the task, f lexible, yet with enough backbone to handle an average corbina of two or three pounds.
In minutes, I had a strike. “Miraculous,” I thought. “I’m already an expert at this game.” Only I hadn’t hooked a corbina, just a lowly little surfperch that I released. The tide was incoming, and I noticed a fish rooting around not far away. I switched from the Holey Moley to a Clouser, a fly designed by Pennsylvania angler Bob Clouser to attract smallmouths on the Susquehanna River. I laid it right on the corbina’s nose and gave it a twitch, but the fish spooked and fled.
In spite of being skunked, I still had a fantasy of serving Imelda a dinner of grilled corbina on New Year’s Eve. That never happened, and it’s probably just as well, since they’re bottom feeders who ingest toxic creatures such as worms. Instead, I grilled swordfish that we ate with a bottle of chardonnay.
The new year came and went with only the surfperch on my scorecard. Shortly afterward, my show was canceled, and I had to pack up, so I never had a chance to become a surf-fishing expert.
But I did finally hook a corbina before I left Santa Monica. I waded in and saw it nosing about in two feet of water by the breakwater where I fished that first day. I tied on a size 2 Clouser, orange and white, and cast it a yard in front of the corbina to lead it along, stripping my line in short, fast bursts to imitate a shrimp in flight. Bang, the corbina took it, but I reacted too quickly and yanked the fly out of its mouth. Disappointing, yes, but I still enjoyed the experience. Every year when Christmas rolls around, I find myself remembering Santa Monica and wishing I could be on the beach in my shorts again, a rod in hand in sunny 60-degree weather.