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California Fishin’ I grew up in Manhattan Beach near Los Angeles, and I used to spend my weekends and school holidays surfing or fishing from the local piers (jetties). Once or twice each summer my dad and mom would take the family camping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains or up to the family cabin at Lake Tahoe. It was there that my dad introduced me to fishing with flies around the age of six or seven. It was not true fly fishing, but instead we used light spinning gear with a small clear plastic bubble filled ¾ with water. The bubble had a hole through it and would slide on the mono line down to a small swivel onto which was tied a light 1.5 to 2m trace and then a small streamer or wet fly. The fly and bubble would be cast out and slowly retrieved with occasional pauses and twitches. The bubble provided the weight for casting but kept the fly riding near the surface, looking like an emerging insect or small baitfish. We used this rig mostly in lakes and larger rivers and it was actually very effective, often confounding bait fishermen who watched us hauling in the trout. Of course in the California mountains the trout only averaged around 10 to 12 inches long, but we still had lots of fun catching rainbows, small browns, and brook trout. And if we hiked in to the highest alpine lakes we sometimes caught golden trout – little jewels of golden yellow and green with markings of orange and red. My wife still enjoys spin fishing with a bubble and fly, and I will often take along an ultra light spinning outfit just in case it ever gets too windy to use my fly rod. This is a great way to introduce younger kids to using flies wherever spin fishing is allowed. In 1965 I moved 100 miles up the coast to Santa Barbara to attend the university. There I met my wife Jennifer, raised two daughters, and taught primary school for 33 years. All along I continued to spin fish the fresh water when we could get there and did a fair amount of sea fishing around Santa Barbara in my 18 ft. boat. Then about eight years ago few local fly fishers got together and began the Santa Barbara Flyfishers club. I went to a meeting and was instantly hooked, taking casting lessons, learning and eventually teaching fly tying, wrapping my own rods, going on club outings, and even raising trout as a science project in my classroom. I met many good fishing mates through the club. Most of them fished only for trout and once or twice a year would travel hundreds or more miles for the “big ones” in places such as northern California, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and even Alaska. A few of us were more pragmatic. We loved to fly fish and wanted to go once or twice a week! There are a couple of seasonal streams in the hills around Santa Barbara that are planted with small hatchery rainbows, but these are not very dependable and the closest good trout water is about an eight hour drive. (I hope you Hamilton fishers know how lucky you are to have such awesome trout fishing so close to home!) So we quickly gave up the idea of being trout purists and headed for the beach – about an eight minute drive. Now more and more of us fly fish the salt water. We fish from the beach, small boats, and even from float tubes in the protected bays and harbours. Our gear usually consists of an 8 wt. rod with a fast sinking shooting head, and we always use a stripping basket at the beach to keep the running line from tangling around our legs when wading in the surf. We use small baitfish or crab type fly patterns and target fish such as barred surf perch (up to 16 inches), corbina (a smaller version of a bonefish), halibut ( a flounder that has to be 22 inches long to be a “keeper”), bonita, bass, and mackerel. One of the things I love about swff is that you never know what you might hook into. One of my friends was fishing for perch when he hooked and 30 minutes later landed a huge striped bass which are extremely rare in our area. We sometimes get taken for a ride by a stingray or sand shark, and in the summer we sometimes get runs of white sea bass which can go over 10 kg. Last June my wife (whose mom was a Kiwi) and I retired from teaching, sold our Santa Barbara house, and moved to northern California where we are less than an hour away from some good trout fishing areas. But the best part of our retirement is that we are now also living half of the year here in New Zealand in a house that we bought a year ago up near Warkworth on the Mahurangi peninsula. I can leave in the morning and be fishing with my mate Ron on the Tongariro by noon, or I can launch a tinnie at the end of our road and be out sea fishing in a matter of minutes. And yesterday I caught four nice snapper on a fly! You might say I’m a damn lucky Yank. I hope to meet some of you on the stream or at one of your meetings. Tight lines and loops, |