Thanks everyone for your posts to this thread and your sentiments, including the fun exchanges.
Staying on the fishing theme, yes I do in fact hope to get Lee his first striper soon. I myself have only caught one, which was a barely-keeper one (18") from the same Marin beach featured in the earlier set of surf fishing posts this year. It was sometime in the early 90s and I recall having pretty slow day with one smallish striped surf perch caught. I made an absolutely horrible cast that sailed off to my right instead of going straight ahead. In shanking this cast to the right I put it in the shallow foam zone, so I hurriedly reeled in only to find that I had inexplicably become hung up on what I thought was simply sand. I wondered how in the world I could be snagged on a rock when I saw a bunch of flapping around in the foam. Anyhow, later this year when the stripers start to frequent the coast, I will try to get Lee his first, although one may come earlier than planned (have read some reports, already). That jetty would in fact be a fine place, too, in addition to my favorite Marin haunts (where I've seen others catch some really nice ones in recent years).
Update, Friday April 21. So, the next chapter? Did Lee repeat his amazing day? Did I undo my "4" cabbie skunk" (as Lee described my day)?
Originally we wanted to go out Saturday because the surf forecast was mellower (2-3' vs 3-5'), but schedule conflicts forced us to go Friday, the last day of Dawn's and Lee's spring break. Both kids went. We bought double the amount of live ghost shrimp at our local Castro Valley bait shop (two dozen) and we brought along the usual backup frozen shrimp from the home freezer. Oddly enough we found more folks fishing the jetty on Friday than we did the previous Saturday. Whereas everyone except us had been crabbing on Saturday Apr 15, and nobody crept beyond about halfway out the jetty, this time pretty much everyone was going after fish and they were dispersed all the way out to the end of the jetty. The total number of folks was probably about the same as it had been on Saturday.
In any case we initially had to stop short of Lee's sweet spot because it looked like someone was fishing very close to it. The bigger surf made Lee's strategy of tossing the bait into submerged gaps between rocks much dicier as the waves drove the stuff backward into snags. In fact he had two big strikes that led to snags and could not be budged. After a few minutes the folks fishing near the old sweet spot migrated further down the jetty and Lee relocated over his honey hole. However, the bigger surf forced him to change his game plan after several snags. In the meantime he led off with a number of very small fish that were quickly released: 3 very small (4" ) cabezon and one small (6") kelp greenling. My skunk continued. Then Lee hooked his first keeper, a striped surf perch of around 11". I was getting a lot of taps but no hook ups, similar to the week before. Finally I unskunked with an 11" striped SP. Lee then brought in another striped SP of similar size and then a black SP, the first one any of us had caught (about 11") and he released a silver SP that ran somewhere in the 9-10". I kept getting tapped and having my bait stripped. I am accustomed to having fish self hook, but I figured I should adjust and try to actually set the hook during the 2nd set of taps. By then we had nearly run out of bait. On my upper hook I put on some of the reserve shrimp, and on the lower hook some pieces of discarded ghost shrimp and frozen shrimp parts (partly dried sitting on the rock). I received the usual taps and set the hook hard. This time, it held into something quite heavy. I had a bit of drama when the fish got stuck behind a rock just before hoisting it out, but I soon got the fish on land: it was a 16" rubberlip surf perch, the largest surf perch anyone in the family had ever seen, hooked on the stale cocktail combo on the lower hook.
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By this point, Lee had left with the last of the bait to try his hand at poke poling. Initially he had picked up the longest sticks/branches he could find washed up on the jetty, but Dawn found someone's telescoping poke pole that they had thrown out because the section stops didn't work anymore. Lee set that up and went off to try. On his first attempt he had just put the tip and bait down in a hole when the gusty winds blew sand into his eye. Because of this he gently set down his pole with the bait still in the hole, but the pole propped on some rocks (so it didn't slide in). A fish, however, grabbed at the bait and yanked the entire rig into the hole, where it promptly sank out of sight and out of reach.
In the meantime, I had used my last available piece of frozen shrimp on one hook to catch a small silver SP in the 7" range, then I had to forage and get some limpets. These brought in two more silvers in the 9-10" range. We released all of our silvers, keeping only the three striped SPs the black SP and the big rubberlip. We had placed these on a stringer on the sheltered side of the jetty. The week before I had tried hanging the stringer on the other side but this was clearly a risky proposition with the waves (that threaten to drive the fish it hole that may be impossible to pull out of). The sheltered stringer situation worked well and the fish looked in nice shape until we quit and I went to check it out to clean the fish. Something had chewed off the tail of the black SP and mangled the head and "chin" area of one of the striped SP. Whereas the damage to the striped SP looked like the sort of things crabs might do, based on my experience with crawdads gutting brookies on a stringer at Roosevelt and Lane Lakes, the removal of the tail and its base from the black SP appeared different and inconsistent with crab nibbling. Who knows. The stinger was in the water very close to the spot where Lee had his poke pole yanked, too.
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Anyhow, as expected neither Lee nor I had success to match Lee's amazing April 15 visit. Lee did, however, set a new family standard for most species caught in one session: 5 (cabezon, kelp greenling, silver, black, and striped SP). I was able to redeem my skunk and I caught our best surf perch to date. For the next visit we will venture further out on the jetty to a place where we can fish all three "settings" (oceanward, 'channel', sheltered) versus focusing exclusively on the oceanward side. I will plan to try out some lures, too, after relying entirely on the high-low bait rigs to date.
I'm not sure when we'll get out next. We have some activities the coming weekend, the next weekend I will be in Fresno, and I only have one day (Saturday) the following weekend before I head to eastern Canada for a week and a half. Then grades are due and my summer will start. I have grad student whom I need to introduce to his field area in the northernmost Sierra (probably at the end of May) and I will try to take my first Sierra casts on the way back from that trip at a spot that may be thawed (except the road may be closed well short of the usual kickoff point; we'll see--if so there may be the option of hiking to what is usually a drive-to spot, too). By then the stripers will probably be getting active along the coast, too...