CaughtOvgard: Rockfish on the fly | Outdoors

SAN FRANCISCO — I was a slow convert to flyfishing and even then, not a wholehearted one. I truly enjoy taking the fly rod out and flailing for fish I’ve grown tired of catching on conventional gear, but up until recently, I’d only ever caught run-of-the-mill freshwater fish on the fly: bass, crappie, perch, salmon, sunfish and trout.

This summer, I ported a fly rod across the country and had every intention of using it for stripers in Maine and tarpon in Florida, but I opted for the more effective, longer-casting spinning outfits to thread my lures between pilings and mangroves.

Part of me regretted not using the fly rod, too, but I couldn’t argue with the success of my spinning rods even as I longed to catch a saltwater fish on the fly.

So when I had the chance to fish some calmer saltwater in the Bay Area recently, I jumped at it, fly rod in hand.

Fisherman’s Wharf

Though numerous cities in California have a “Fisherman’s Wharf”, an alarming number of these piers have been gentrified so thoroughly that they no longer even allow their namesake activity. It’s disturbing to watch the cultural appropriation of fishing by urbanites who relish the fresh bounty of the sea on their $40 or $50 plates, but can’t stomach seeing the same fish caught. People who don’t understand what “progressive” actually means ban fishing from these piers that have — in some cases for almost a century — been central to the fishing community.

Fortunately, not every wharf is off-limits just yet, and even those that ban the general public still allow commercial fishermen to ply their trade. I just happen to have a friend, Ben Zeiger (@big_bnji), who is a commercial fisherman. He allowed me and another friend, Steve Wozniak, to chase rockfish in the calmer waters of the San Francisco Bay from the back of his boat. We used conventional gear, and the fishing didn’t disappoint.

The sheltered waters of the Bay were a nice change, and I silently regretted not using my fly rod once again. Roughly 100 miles south just a few days later, a similar opportunity presented itself, and this time, I grabbed the fly rod.

Monterey Bay

Monterey Bay is a misnomer; it’s not really a bay in the same way its northern allies, San Francisco or San Pablo, actually are. It’s really just a dip in the shoreline that helps calm weather a bit by limiting the pounding ferocity of the surf coming from the open ocean.

Three main ports line Monterey Bay, with Santa Cruz to the north, Moss Landing in the middle and Monterey to the south.

Another friend, Vince Golder (@prickly_sculpin), left his Santa Cruz home to join me in the hunt for rockfish at night. He was chasing copper rockfish (a fish he hadn’t caught) while I was after olive rockfish (one I hadn’t caught).

He’d come armed with a medium-light spinning outfit, a light jig head and scented plastics. I’d opted to try catching a rockfish on the fly rod, thinking it would be a challenge.

It wasn’t.

On my very first cast, I landed a black and yellow rockfish. Then a grass rockfish. Then another black and yellow. Rockfish pulled about three times harder than a similarly-sized smallmouth bass and fight in much the same way, making the fight on my 7-weight very memorable.

Vince, meanwhile, crushed it with conventional gear.

Naturally, I was trying for olives, so only Vince caught them. In turn, he was after coppers, so I caught them all.

Eventually, we each added a new species, but I was forced to change to spinning gear and missed the chance to catch a new species on the fly for the first time. Still, the night bite was so hot that I caught fish on three separate streamers and even beat my record for most rockfish in a single day. My previous record of 29 came on a charter boat, but this time, I caught 34 rockfish from shore — 30 of them on the fly — including black, black and yellow, blue, brown, copper, grass, kelp and a single olive rockfish.

I was born in the 90s, so I’m justified in saying that evening was pretty fly.

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