Fishing for Pargo, Quepos

This time in Manuel Antonio I did less fishing than I have in the past. Partly because I was having health problems and partly because I was having a good time doing other things. I still had some good times fishing. Chris, my friend and Captain of the Kinembe sport fishing boat took me out fishing with some other friends one day. We talked about what to fish for and we decided to catch some live bait and go fish for big pargo and broomtails or other big bottom fish at the local 26 reef. We looked around and found some nice small bonito to catch and with the lookdowns and sardines we already had in the live well we figured we had enough bait and we headed to the reef.

We baited up and started to drop for some pargo. At first we were catching jacks as soon as we hit the water. Jacks are fun to catch but they can be pests when you want to catch some other types of fish below them. We switched up to heavier weights and bigger baits and we threw them down again. Almost as soon as mine hit the water a marlin grabbed the bait. He ran for a bit and then Chris said time to set the hook. Boom. The fish was on. I had already fought enough marlins to know I didn't want to try to land this one. They kick your ass every time. They are not fun to fight, they are serious hard work to try to land and this one was big.

I told Chris I wanted to play with it for a few minutes to watch it dance on top of the water and then I wanted to cut the line and go back to our pargo fishing. The tackle was too small at forty pound test to land this big marlin anyway so why bother. I held the rod while it sang away when the fish ran and Chris started to follow the big fish as it headed out to deeper water. I was pumping it in and regaining line as we chased it.

After about fifteen minutes Chris yells out, "Should I cut the line now?"

I yelled back, "No. just give me a few more minutes. I want to see it dance to see how big it is." I was having fun waiting for the fish to jump out of the water and start dancing. I was reeling up when I was allowed to by the marlin. He was in charge not me. My twenty pounds of drag were nothing but a minor nuisance to a fish this size. After another half hour Chris checks with me again, Are you sure you don't want to cut the line now?"

I replied, "I just want to see it once. It is a really powerful fish and I just want to see how big it is." Chris shook his head and kept watching me working at getting some line back. We were several miles from the hookup spot by now.

It went on like this for another hour. My friend had my camera and he kept taking pics of my rod going bendo. I told him to turn the camera off and wait until we could see the fish because I wanted a picture of this one dancing on the water. He would turn the camera off and then a few minutes later he would be taking more pics. I just kept working. My arms were getting sore now. I had some cramping just starting. We were about two and a half hours into my fifteen minutes of fun. I am really stupid sometimes. The adrenaline is a drug though and I am addicted for sure. The high pitched song of the reel every time the fish made a move just kept pumping that drug into my veins. I had to take a break to piss. I gave the rod to my friend to hold while I hung one off the side and drank some water and coke. I ate a quick sandwich that the guys had made for lunch and then I was ready to take the rod back.

About three and a half hours after the hookup I saw the leader come into sight. I stood near the rail to try to catch a glimpse of my foe. I screamed when I looked down and saw a fish that looked almost as long as our boat. It wasn't that long, but it was over fifteen feet long and really fat. It rolled on its side and looked at me. The blue color on its side was like a neon sign in Las Vegas. It was pulsing bright neon blue color. I was in awe of its beauty. I looked at it for a few seconds and was yelling at my friend to take a picture of it but he looked at me with a blank stare and asked me what the red hotdog with the line through it meant. I looked at him and was pissed as hell. "That would be a battery not a hotdog. You wore the battery all the way down taking bendo pics of me and you can't take a pic of the fish now? I have another battery in the case go change it quick."

Right about that time the marlin had had enough of posing for pics and it took off. I was pinned to the rail with the rod totally bendo and Chris came over to help me hold on to the rod as the big fish took off on a reel screaming, fast deep dive. We were eleven miles from the hookup point Chris told me. I told him I want to get it back up so I could get a pic and he just laughed at me. About a half hour later I was making slow progress when my arms suddenly started to cramp big time. I had to give up. Chris grabbed the rod and cranked the drag down even more and tried to muscle the fish in close enough for a picture. He worked it for about five minutes and all of a sudden the rod went big time bendo again and with the drag that tight it finally broke off. My fifteen minutes of fun was over now four hours later. I will never again hold a rod with a marlin on it no matter what. I finally learned my lesson that day.

We estimated the marlin at around 650 pounds based on its length and girth when we saw it. I had caught a five hundred pounder a year earlier that died on us so I knew how big a five hundred pounder was and this fish was considerably larger. I did not want to over estimate the size because that is the typical thing to do. So 650 is the size and we are sticking to it. I never did get a picture of the fish and I had sore arms for a week. It was hard work but it is an addiction for sure. Never again. Never again.

We went back to pargo fishing but I could not even hold a rod now. I just kicked back and watched them pull up a few small pargo and then we went home. I had a few beers in town and after a long hot shower, I went straight to bed before it was even dark. Never again is all I said over and over until I finally fell asleep. Never again.

By the way these pics are from a different day. I have no pics of the marlin I hooked on this day. The big fish Chris is holding up is a broomtail, the red ones are pargo, the billfish is a sailfish and the marlin dancing on the water is not mine.

Back in Manuel Antonio

It was raining a lot in Quepos/Manuel Antonio when I first arrived back this time. A hillside slid down and wiped out some houses near the gas station in town and for a short while closed the only station in town. That panicked some drivers but the station reopened quick enough so that there really was not a problem. The bridges north of town flooded and isolated the towns of Quepos and Manuel Antonio for several days. The stores quickly ran out of goods to sell since all the goods come into town by truck over the bridges. At one point a big tree came floating down the river and the city thought that it would take the bridge out completely but it just slammed into the bridge and then slid under it and went out to sea. The bridges were terrible and it would not have been a loss if it had gone down. It was built out of left over rails from the trains that used to carry bananas to the port from the banana farms before the banana blight wiped out the local banana business. Now the banana fields have been replaced with palm oil trees. Vietnam created a good market for palm oil to be used in the making of napalm for the war. now everywhere you look there are palm oil trees in the Quepos area. The processing plant is a major polluting eyesore on the road between Quepos and Parrita to the North. They burn the dead palm fronds to make the oil from the nuts so it is a self sustaining business that uses very little fuel. The nuts are brought to the plant in oxcarts and some tractor pulled wagons. There are common sights on the road to Quepos.

I found a house to live in near the top of the hill in Manuel Antonio. It was a brand new house just built by the owner in a nice family complex. I was one of only two non family members living in the compound of 10 or 11 houses. I never had to worry about thieves or anything because someone from the family was always around to guard my place when I wasn't home. I liked the security that offered. The house was a two bedroom with a living room and a kitchen dining room with one bath with a shower in it. One of my old girlfriends immediately found me and wanted to move in with me. Her and her 13 year old daughter were basically homeless at the time so I let them stay with me for a while. Living with a kid again was not my idea of fun. Girls at that age are at their absolute worst behavior and this girl was no exception at the time. All her teachers and everybody said she was the perfect child but at the house she was a total hormonal mess. One night she got up and made herself some food. She finished off 2 pounds of cheese, a loaf of bread, half a kilo of hamburger, a couple liters of juices and all the ice cream and sweets in the house. She also left the kitchen in a disaster zone. I had to laugh but I also could not allow that type of behavior or she would weigh a few hundred pounds real quick. I talked it over with her mother and we worked out a plan to prevent it from happening again like that.

Having a girlfriend and her daughter living with me curtailed my flavor of the day fun somewhat but did not eliminate it entirely. I just went to their place or did it when my friend was out of town which she was often. She had relatives all over the country and she went to see them sometimes. I had plenty of time for myself. I mostly hung out at the beach again. I really love the beach at Manuel Antonio. The palm trees lining it and the nice quality of sand with just the right amount of people to make it interesting but not too crowded. The police patrolled it to prevent nudity but there were still plenty of people that flaunted the rules. I played in the surf for a couple of hours a day to keep myself fit. I also walked along the beach. Walking in the sand was like going to physical therapy for me. It was very helpful for my leg pain and mobility problems. I would kick back on the sand and get nicely heated up then go walk for a while then so surf to cool down. The routine was improving my health and keeping my weight down too. Plus I met lots of dates at the beach. My friends were all amazed at the way I would just go pick a prospect out and go talk to her for a while then go have a date with them. The Ticas never say no. That is all you have to know to be successful, easy as picking grapes.

Healing in San Jose Costa Rica

I spent a couple of months living in San Jose Costa Rica while I healed up from my surgeries. It was a relaxing enjoyable experience. I frequently went down to the Hotel Presidente to talk to the guys there and all their experiences with the girls of Costa Rica. The Del Ray and Marlin Bar are just around the corner from the hotel and lots of the men stay at the Presidente while they play with the hookers. They sit around in the mornings and compare their notes and to rate the various girls. I cracked up listening to some of their stories about the hunt for girls. It isn't much of a challenge in Costa Rica. Prostitution is legal and regulated. The Del Ray Hotel is one of the most popular places to pick up the girls. The bar there has anywhere from fifty to hundreds of girls at any one time to choose from. Myself I never indulged but some of these guys were hooked on the game like it was a drug. Lots of them told their wives that they were going to go fishing in Costa Rica but it wasn't red snapper they meant, it was pink snapper.

I also played the horses over at the casino. Sometimes I bet on the sports book too if I felt the odds were right. I only play numbers not favorites when I gamble. I do it for enjoyment and I keep the amounts low so that it is just for fun. Some of the high rollers would watch me making my small bets and going up to cash my tickets way more often then they did and they would tell me I should make bigger bets and I could make a good living playing the horses. For almost four years I played the horses in Berkeley California and I kept books of all my time and money in and out. I did make money but when it was divided by all the time it took to make it the hourly rate was terrible. Maybe bigger bet amounts would have made it worthwhile for me but that is not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

I met a lot of girls both local ones and tourists while hanging out in San Jose. I preferred them to the hookers. Don't ask me why I just do. My living situation did not allow me to bring anyone home for dates so I had to get hotel rooms or go to their places. It was fun and I only did it when I was in the mood which was too often I guess.

I had a lot of friends in San Jose by now. Some of them were fishermen I had met and others I just met when I was in San Jose or Manuel Antonio. We hung out and played cards or went to the bars and clubs together. I played pool at a bar near where I lived. I met quite a few girls there that were in Costa Rica for school, mostly language classes. They tended to be way younger than I was but we had fun together. They were from all over the world but mostly Americans, Canadians and Europeans. I think the average age of my partners was around 23 years old. I had a hard time with the age difference at first but I quickly got over it and just had fun no matter what age I ended up hanging out with.

When the rains started coming all day every day and the temperature got cold, then I had to get out of San Jose. I booked a flight to Quepos. The flight to Quepos is in a small 11 passenger plane and the flight is often times very frightening. On this flight it was clear when we left San Jose but in Quepos it was raining. From the plane we could see all the flooding below us. It had been raining very hard in the Quepos area and lots of houses were under water. Huge areas looked like lakes with houses in them. Our pilot had to make 9 aborted attempts to find the runway in Quepos. It was not fun. We would circle around line up for the runway and then go in and he would miss the approach and then gun the motor and roar back up and around again for another attempt. On one failed approach we went through tree branches as we climbed up. He obviously was not a first rate pilot. On the tenth round he finally put us down and we all were thankful to be alive. That was a scary ride for all of us. Even the pilot looked scared when we landed. I called a friend to come and pick me up and I went and checked into a hotel until I could find a house to live in.

The American Medical Care Myth

Winter was coming on in the Bay Area and I had to get out of the cold so using frequent flier miles I had accumulated, I flew to San Jose Costa Rica again. I stayed in San Jose this time to get some medical work done. I looked up a woman I had lived with before and stayed with her out in Zapote near the university. I paid her three hundred dollars a month for room and board. I had a nice clean modern one bedroom with a private bath and she was a great cook and a good conversationalist. I enjoyed staying with her. She was constantly trying to talk me into staying with her permanently but I could never settle down like that I kept telling her. I was just too much of a wanderer to settle down in one place.

I had some bleeding ulcers on my face that I wanted a dermatologist to check out. I made appointments with the doctors in Costa Rica before I left California so I settled in quickly with my friend and headed off to the hospital the next day for my appointments. I had been trying to get treatment in the United States but the medical care in the States is very very very slow if you are poor. I had been trying to get an appointment with a dermatologist in California for over a year without success so I resorted to Costa Rica's high quality and speedy medical care system.

I took a bus to the hospital early in the morning and saw the dermatologist. He wanted to do an immediate biopsy and have a plastic surgeon close up the wounds for me. We booked it for the next day. When I returned I was taken to a procedure room with a couple of doctors and some nursing staff. The dermatologist cut out the ulcerating area and the plastic surgeon closed up the golfball sized holes for me. My face was very swollen from having work done in two areas and then one area of my arm also. I took a taxi back to the house I was at and rested up for a week to let it heal. The area on my face healed very nicely with only a small scar. The melanoma was gone for now. I went back for a followup dermatology visit a couple of weeks later and the doctor did a christmas tree on me. I asked him what he meant and he laughed. That was his code to his nurse that he was going to be doing a lot of removals on a patient. I quickly found out why it was called decorating a christmas tree as bright red balls started to appear all over my arms, shoulders, back and legs as the doctor started to freeze off various skin conditions around my body. I did look like a christmas tree covered in red balls when he was finished treating about 40 or 50 areas on me. It didn't hurt so much as just made me look pretty stupid for a week while they all healed.

The bill for all the work was fair. I would have had to pay around ten to fifteen thousand dollars for this work in the States but in Costa Rica it cost me $275 for the entire package including dermatology, plastic surgery and lab work. The United States thinks they have the best medical care in the world. You can ask almost anybody in the country and they will immediately say the U.S. is number one. In reality the U.S. is rated down around 37th or 38th in the world for quality of medical care, just below Mexico usually. If you are rich or have the top of the line health insurance then you might do alright in the States but a person like me with no insurance and unable to even purchase insurance if I wanted to because of my preexisting conditions, the United States is the last place I want to be when I need medical care and this was a classic example of why. Costa Rica treated me quickly, fully and cheaply all at the same time. I was still waiting for my appointment in the States. About a year later I did finally get an appointment in the States at a dermatologist and they looked at the work the doctors did and told me they did a good job. The American doctors would not do the follow up work that the Costa Rican Doctors had told me I should get. The American doctors just wanted to wait until I had more visible tumors before they would do anything at all. They told me to just come back in two years for another visit. The myth of the Great American medical superiority over the rest of the world is just that, a myth perpetrated by the American Medical Association and the American government. Maybe one day Americans will wake up and see the truth their lackluster medical care but I doubt that they will in my lifetime.

Train Accident

Right after I arrived back in the Bay Area from Montana I had another near death experience that I will never forget. I was driving my car after a morning of shopping and I came to a railroad crossing on Virginia Street in Berkeley. I had to stop behind another vehicle to wait for a train to go by. I spaced out with my vehicle in neutral. I was just staring in front of me at the empty train crossing. The Berkeley train station is just South of this intersection and trains sometimes stop at the station to load and unload. In this case the train coming from the South and heading North did stop at the train station. I could see the engine of the train to the right or South just on the edge of my vision. The crossing barricades were still down and the lights were blinking red but the train came to a complete stop at the station. The vehicle in front of me decided not to wait for the train to finish loading and went around the barrier to cross the tracks. I was watching but not paying any attention to the scene in front of me. Then all of a sudden there was a train barreling along going South. The train was a high speed Amtrack passenger train going about 65 miles per hour. At the same instant I heard a loud screeching, crunching, scraping squealing kind of sound coming from my right to the South. I quickly turned my head and looked in the direction that the sound was coming from. I could see a crusty steel building and some towers for the cement plant near there. Then I saw some debris flying through the air. I looked closely at the items flying through the air and I noticed a car battery and some other parts that looked like parts of a vehicle. Then my brain started to assemble the whole picture for me. The car that was in front of me was struck by the high speed train and the debris flying through the air were parts of the vehicle. The sound was the noise from the impact bouncing off the steel building to my right and reflecting back at me. I crept forward along the street so that I could look South down the tracks. I saw a ball of steel about the size of a garbage can spinning to a stop about a hundred yards down the tracks. It had to be the vehicle that had been in front of me.

I started to respond with some confusion since I was looking right at the vehicle when it was struck by the train but it had happened so fast that it did not even register in my brain. I figured it out and by then the train was gone and the barriers went back up and the lights turned themselves off. I turned and drove along the side of the tracks to a spot as close as I could come to the ball of steel on the ground. I got out of my car as about twenty other people came out of the buildings in the industrial area to see what the loud noise was. I pointed at the ball of steel and some of the people started to gather about thirty feet away from the ball. Nobody wanted to get close enough to see the mangled body or bodies inside. I talked briefly with the people there and then I volunteered to go look closely at the ball of twisted metal. to see if the driver and any passengers were inside or possibly thrown out or something like that. I slowly walked up to the used to be a vehicle ball expecting to see tons of blood and gore from crushed bodies inside. There was a sunroof or moonroof whatever that miraculously was still intact. It was right on the end of the garbage can sized ball of metal like a lid on a sardine can. I crept up and glanced down inside the tinted glass of the sunroof. What I saw surprised me so much I kind of jumped back a bit. Inside the glass I was expecting to see red gore but instead I saw a bright, shiny, glittery, silver colored woman with long straight hair who wasn't moving at all. My first thought was that she must be dead. I then tapped lightly on the sunroof window and said,"This might be a dumb sounding question, but are you alright?"

She shocked me when she responded, "I think so."

I told her that help was on the way and asked if there was anything she thought I could do to help her. I also asked her if she was injured anywhere that she knew of. She told me she thought she was fine but that her head hurt a little bit. I had to laugh at her when she said that. She had just been hit by a train going 65 miles per hour and she could still talk. Then all of a sudden my mind figured out that the silver color was from the dust used in the airbag to help it deploy at the high speed needed in an accident. She was totally covered in the silver dust. This airbag had clearly helped her survive by creating a pocket of air pressure that was at the center of the ball of steel wrapped around her.

The fire department arrived and they stood back while I was talking to the women. They wanted me to keep talking to her to try to keep her calm. Like my racing heart could calm anybody but I kept talking to her. The fire fighters wanted to wait for the jaws of life to arrive but then I told them that I thought she was completely unpinned and if we just took off the window we could slide her out of her little cocoon. One of them came up and looked at the situation and agreed with me. He and I carefully pulled off the rubber seal around the window and lifted the glass away. At that point I stepped back and let the professionals take over. They slid her out and put her on a back board to transport her. I was told to wait there for the Southern Pacific agent to give a witness statement. I told them I would do that.

The Southern Pacific representative told me it was a miracle that she survived. He told me he has been investigating collisions with trains his entire life and he had never even heard of anyone ever surviving a hit by a train going 65 miles per hour to say nothing of surviving virtually unhurt like this lucky woman did. I had to wait until all the emergency vehicles left before I could get my car out of the place where I left it. I needed the time to unwind from this experience. I was a bit hyped up from all the tension over the last hour. I got in my car and some of the workers from the area that I first saw thanked me for my help and I went home thankful for still being alive. Later that night on the news I found out that she was the only passenger in the vehicle and that her only injury was a detached retina in one eye that was surgically repaired at the hospital before they released her. She was one lucky lady.

Life can be Dangerous

I recently got some feedback that my life is more mundane and less interesting because it is not as dangerous now as when I was in places like Africa. That is true for the most part. But I have had brushes with death since I left the dark continent, even some brushes with death when I least expected it in sunny California.

For instance I took my son out for a walk one day. He was going on two years old and we went up to a park near our house called Tilden Park. The Bay Area has some great parks and this is just one of them. We went to Jewel Lake with the plan being to walk around the shoreline trail to see the turtles sunning themselves and maybe some ducks swimming around or a garter snake slithering along the path if we were lucky.

It had been raining hard for a few days and we had been stuck inside while it poured down but today it was sunny and warmer. There had been some mudslides around the Bay Area from the copious amounts of rain we had been getting. A couple of houses slid down some steep hillsides and some roads were covered by avalanches of mud up in the hills. California soil has a large amount of clay in it. When the clay gets wet it absorbs water and starts to swell. That swelling has an awesome amount of power to it. Even very large heavy buildings are easily lifted up by the power of the expanding clay. It also gets slippery when it is wet. The combination of forces causes landslides whenever we get heavy rain.

We weren't too worried about landslides as we were just hiking along a mostly flat section of trail with just a few small hills which we easily hiked up and down. Even a toddler like my son had no trouble with these little hills. The trails were muddy but getting dirty was part of the fun for both of us. I am just a kid at heart. Therapists have labeled me as having a Peter Pan complex. I just laugh at them when they say that. I don't ever want to grow up and don't think I ever will. We enjoyed watching the turtles. We even saw some fish swimming in the shallow water near the shore. We tried to catch a frog we saw in some reeds but it was too quick for me to grab it. We both were laughing hard at my attempts to catch the speedy frog. If I had managed to catch the little bugger, we would have just looked at the frog and released it again. We checked out a pack rat's nest at the far end of the lake. The mound of garbage the rat had collected was almost ten feet high. Obsessive compulsive behavior is not limited to humans from the looks of this guys nest. I pointed out some deer in the woods and after a long stare my son finally saw them and he got very excited about them for some reason. We were having a blast, just two kids walking and playing in the post rain mud.

My son got tired after about an hour of hiking and playing so I started to carry him. We walked up a small incline and near the top there was a big puddle of water. I was going to jump across the puddle but holding my son it was tough to jump since he weighed in at close to 40 pounds already. I placed my hand on a tree trunk thinking that I could use the tree as a balancing reference and to push off from it. I put my right hand on the tree trunk and held my son tightly with my left arm. I leaned onto the tree and got ready to jump but before I could jump the ground below me suddenly turned into quicksand and I immediately started to sink. I panicked and threw my son as far away as I could as I quick as a blink sank into the suddenly soft mud. He landed about eight feet away unhurt but scared and I sank until my feet got tangled up in roots from the tree and then I stopped sinking. I was buried up to my hips. The ground then resolidified and I was stuck with tremendous pressure pushing in on my legs. My son wanted to get up and run back to me but I was afraid he might get sucked into the mud too so I yelled at him to stay put. He listened to me for once and stayed where he landed but started to cry hysterically. I was scared that I could slip off the tree roots and sink all the way out of sight. I started to try to dig my way out of the mud but as I dug, the water from the puddle just refilled the mud back into the hole I was making. I started to wiggle and pull myself up by holding on to the tree. If I pushed against the tree the ground would soften up and when I let up on pressure against the tree the ground firmed back up. I was in some sort of suspension with the water and clay where the added pressure of the tree roots turned the mud into a liquid but without the slight pressure it was a solid. By alternately pushing against the tree and pulling myself up as hard as I could I slowly made progress getting out of the mud. It took me fifteen or twenty minutes of serious hard work to get myself out of the predicament but I was finally free and able to roll away from the puddle and quick sand like mud. I lost my shoes and socks in the struggle but I was extremely lucky to not have lost my life also. I could easily have just been sucked completely under the mud and just disappeared forever. I don't think I would have ever been found if I had gone totally under. Who would think to look for me buried in mud?

I picked up my son and we hugged like there was no tomorrow. He calmed down quickly, but myself, I was a wreck. I was scared shitless to say the least and shaking like a 240 volt vibrator. I very carefully and quickly walked straight back to the car with my son clutched in my arms. When I got near the park headquaters near the Little Farm I informed the rangers what had happened and suggested that they close the trail around the lake which they quickly did. I walked to my car. My car was only about a week old and we were both covered head to toe with tons of California clay. It was raining again so I rinsed my son off in a puddle and put him in his car seat. Then I tried to rinse off myself but I was too covered with mud to get even close to clean. I looked around and there was nobody in sight so I just stripped off all my clothes and rinsed off in a puddle as best as I could and jumped in my car to drive home. I drove home naked. When I got home I honked the horn to try to get my wife to come out and bring me some towels and clothes. She just happened to have about ten of her girlfriends over at the time and they all had to come out and laugh at my predicament. I laughed along with them but I was still petrified from my near death experience in the mud.

More Bay Area Fishing

After the size of the fish in Alaska it was a bit disappointing to go back to the smaller sized fish in the San Francisco Bay area. The fishing in the bay has declined on an annual basis for whatever reasons. I started out fishing for perch and flounder from piers. They almost completely disappeared over the course of five years or so. Then after too many skunks going for perch, I changed my focus to stripers and halibut. The striper and halibut fishing would be good one year and bad the next for some reason. I also went offshore fishing for rockfish and salmon. The limits for fish started to drop as the fishing got worse and worse so the twenty rockfish limit became a fifteen fish limit and a few years later was dropped down to only ten fish with some species totally protected from take. The ling cod limit went from five to three then to two fish. Halibut went down from five fish to three fish and stayed there. Salmon size limits went up and the seasons started to get shorter. Despite all the attempts at managing the fishery by limiting anglers takes and things the fishing has continued to go down in the bay area. I think that might be because it isn't the sport anglers that are causing the declines. The overall habitat destruction and pollution along with the reduced fresh water due to pumping the Sacramento river south to Los Angeles has more to do with the declines in my humble opinion. There are numerous long involved studies going on to try to find a scientific reason for the decline of fish but by the time the studies are done the fishery is going to be too far gone to recover. This has happened in the cod fishery on the east coast and in many other places as well.

I did do a long range trip of ten days down to Mexico. The long range trip was not much fun for me. I guess I got spoiled by fishing on small charter boats with two to three other people at the most. This trip on a cattle call long range boat was overcrowded and just a good example of the worst coming out in humanity. There was constant pushing and shoving at the over packed rail for elbow room while fishing, constant tangles and lost tackle due to tangles and some near fights as well as two groups of gangbangers that were threatening each other. The captain called the non gangbanger passengers into the wheelhouse and we talked about what to do in case the two groups broke out into a serious fight. I was appalled by it all and just gave up on even trying to fish. I just sat on the upperdeck in a nice comfortable chair and watched all the idiots fighting and scrambling for a few fish. The captain came up and tried to talk me into fishing some more but I just refused. It wasn't the captain's fault that the other passengers were all acting like assholes, although he could have booked less passengers and taken better control of the pushing and shoving at the rails. The fishing was not very good either. No tuna and two days of no fish at all got everybody even more stirred up. The food was good but not as good as I usually found on the long range boats. I was happy when the trip ended and I just walked off and drove home. I gave a big twenty dollar tip and the deckhands gave me attitude for it but I really thought they all did a poor job and I wasn't going to tip them for their lackluster job. Just because I was on the trip does not mean a big tip has to be paid. The tip is a reward and I normally tip well because almost every other boat I have been on the deckhands are hardworking friendly and helpful but in this case they were none of that.

We did have some awesome albacore trips. We would leave the dock around two A.M. and arrive at the fishing grounds around five hours later depending on where the fish were. For albacore the boats around the bay area troll around four to six or more heavy tackle lures and when there is a strike on the lures the idea is to reel them in hard and fast to try to get the school of fish to come up near the boat. The deckhands chum live anchovies around the boat as soon as there is a lure strike. The anglers on the boat that are not reeling in the lures drop live bait over and mooch it for tuna. To be in the middle of a school of tuna boiling around you is definitely an angler's delight. Hooking a thirty pound albacore on light tackle with no weight is a blast. Sometimes we would troll all day for nothing. That is always disappointing but on other trips we hit the jackpot of fish boiling around the boat and we can load up on albacore. Fresh albacore is great to eat. I always shared it with my friends when I was able to catch a bunch of it.

I also went sturgeon fishing sometimes. I tried to catch a monster but for years all I caught were normal sized ones to about a hundred pounds or so. Then one day I was fishing from a pier in the Napa River when I got a nice hard bite and I hooked onto a monster sized fish. It immediately took all six hundred yards of line I had on my reel and took me down to the knot. I figured it would break but miraculously the fish stopped running there and for the next two hours I was able to slowly crank him back to the pier. When it was about fifty feet away he surfaced and rolled. A huge crowd of people started to show up and watch the battle. It would run off a few hundred yards and I would work it back, he would roll and then swim off again. Every time he rooled the crowd cheered. After about four hours of this the fish just went and sat on the bottom. I could not budge it. I tried every trick I know from twanging the line to giving it slack but nothing would get the big fish moving again. finally an eighty pound swivel broke on me and the fish was free, It came up and rolled once more for the crowd and then slowly sauntered off again. I guess that is why it was so big. He knew the game. I wasn't the first disappointed angler he encountered. The State seems to think the sturgeon are endangered now but there seems to be the same amount to me. I don't understand the state's thinking process.

Now the government of California and the Federal government are starting to curtail fishing completely in large areas. The plan is causing the areas still left open for fishing to become overcrowded and hence over fished. I don't know what the solution is but the fishing is getting worse all the time. I do hope that something finally works and the fishery is saved from total collapse as fishing is a great way to enjoy the outdoors.