The cloudy & wet skies that passed through the bay area on Wednesday quickly parted overnight, leaving mostly sunny, blue skies over the north Marin coastline yesterday. Unfortunately, the strong pressure gradient parked along the coast meant gusty northerly winds would be howling over the Pt. Reyes peninsula. Undeterred, I returned once more to Drake's Beach where I sought protection from the lumpy seas & near gale-force gusts raging elsewhere. I spent a few hours during the late afternooon slacktide fishing beneath the south-facing bluffs where pockets of near-dead calm extended sufficiently into the shorebreak for me to get a few casts out with the 0-wt TXL. I started with a triple fly tippet of Slinky Seducers working the frothy water churned by both waves & wind:




Often, the tailwind picked up my line in mid-cast & carried it out quite a ways beyond the surfline - it's not often I can make a +80-ft cast with a 16-ft section of T8 using the 0-wt! The fish seemed to be a little more timid in their biting behavior compared to the day before. I could feel the flies being lightly mouthed without any of the hooks catching. After completing several dozen casts, I eventually brought a small BSP to hand, but the subtle grabs continued through the afternoon. That's when I decided to put on my #12 Dingleberry fly patterns:




OK, you can stop smirking now (I apologize for not coming up with a sexier name for these flies). Anyway, the Dingleberries were effective in lip-hooking a few more BSP's as the flies slowly drifted in the current while I kept the flies suspended as they swung with the current in the skinny surfwash...




I later switched back to the Seducers as evening approached - the fish still weren't very aggressive, but they provided a couple of good tugs before I knocked it off for the night. All told, I C&R'd 4 BSP's, with the largest being about 8-9 inches. The breezy weather & bumpy swells are forecast to linger through the weekend, so be prepared to tough it out if anyone's planning to fish the suds over the next few days.

TL's,

-Mark