Go/No Go

We went back to the ocean yesterday because every forecast in the known universe guessed that all of the conditions - except one - would be decent.  Two foot swells at seven seconds, 3-4 knot winds, eight inch secondary swells, and no wind waves.

The lone discouraging prediction was the tide: it would be a super-duper, low, low, very low tide at launch time.  Those who watch the tides as closely as me know that the height of the ocean at low tide is almost always a positive number, like 2.0 feet.  Yesterday's low was to be -2.2 feet, which is about as low as I've ever seen a low tide get.

Oh, if only the predictions had matched what we found.  They got the tides right - it was really low water - but they missed everything else.  The swells were more like 3-4 feet, the wind was up around 6-8 knots, and I couldn't tell anything about the secondary swells because the surface was covered with nine inch chop.  Not wind chop, the sea was simply adorned with a rough and bumpy surface.  Very interesting.

We took our time rigging up.  My companion was staring at the quarter mile of sloppy beach that had been the bottom of the bay mere hours earlier, hoping it would get more narrow if we tarried in the parking lot long enough.  I was eyeing the line of breaking surf inside the bay, where I'd never before seen so much as a ripple, hoping it was an optical illusion.

When we finally ran out of things to fiddle with, we headed to the water.

We paddled to the mouth of the bay and stopped.  The short route to the fishing grounds was back to being a washing machine.  We moved out a bit further - I was thinking the taller swells were just hanging around the mouth of the bay - to see what it would be like to go out and around the furthest rock, and it wasn't going to be pretty.  My companion asked if we should try to shoot through the crack again, but I'm wiser now than I was two weeks ago, and this time I just stared into the crack and kept my mouth shut.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have good days when I have the get up and go of an 18 year old, I have normal days when I'm at least as good as I ever was, and I have bad days when I'm more like a zombie on The Walking Dead.  The days come and go without rhyme or reason - and without warning.  Wednesday was a Good Day for me, yesterday was a Bad Day.

It's not a matter of strength, it's all about endurance.  The short route was out of the question because it takes a longer spell of hard paddling (or pedaling) to get through it than I had in me - the relatively easy paddle to the mouth of the bay had proven that.  I felt I could make it out and around the far rock, but only in one direction; not there and back again.  Shooting the crack was a bad idea because there's that one spot where we need to accelerate like an F-16 on afterburner to get past it.  Maybe I could'a, maybe I couldn't, and I still haven't smoothed out the gouges from the last time I didn't quite accelerate quickly enough.

I've been out in worse conditions than what we found yesterday.  I've been reasonably happy in four foot swells with three foot secondaries and two foot wind waves.  I've had no qualms about fog so thick I couldn't see where my cast fly landed.  I've paddled against winds in which I couldn't stop paddling without being blown backwards fifty feet.

On a good day, I would have laughed at three foot swells and eight knot wind.  On a normal day, I'd have shrugged off the swells and pushed through the wind.  Yesterday I couldn't have conquered a trembling tea cup and a hummingbird fart.

Yesterday was a lesson - two lessons, really.  Don't believe what Magic Seaweed tells you because after I returned home, I checked it again and it was still telling the world that there were baby swells and no wind.  Liars!  The second lesson was that it's not just the conditions on the ocean that require a Go/No-Go decision, it's also how I'm feeling.  Not feeling mentally, but what my physical condition may be.

It's hard to describe how I felt, bobbing in the swells, wanting to go further and knowing it would be the wrong thing to do.  Feeling awful about what it meant to the guy with whom I often go fishing because I knew he won't go anywhere I couldn't go.  It puts a lot of weight on you when you're contemplating a No Go decision.  I wanted to shout, "Wednesday I would'a!" but Wednesday wasn't yesterday and yesterday was when I needed to get it done.  Rats!

In the end, it was No Go.  We stayed inside the curiously shallow bay and didn't so much as cause a single fish to feel the least bit threatened by our presence.  Totally skunked; not even so much as catching a a crab or a sea-urchin - which I still don't count as "fish" except to claim we didn't get skunked because we caught one.

Maybe it was fortuitous that I didn't decide differently - my companion sent a message saying his neighbor took his dogs to the beach a few minutes after we were gone for the day and reported the winds were pretty fierce when he arrived and a thick fog was starting to settle-in before he left (fog, by the way, didn't appear anywhere in the forecasts), and if we'd been out in the fishing grounds, it would have been an ugly trip back.

It could be that we got lucky.  We tend to do that - the number of times my companion and I have planted our feet on shore just as the conditions reverse themselves would seem to be an amazing steak of luck if it weren't for someone announcing, "We did it again!  We're masters of the weather!"

We fly-fishers never pass up an opportunity to take credit for dumb luck.

I should re-write this thing because it reads as dreary, bordering on self-pity, but I'm not feeling pitiful.  It wasn't as much of a fun day as it could have been, and there were no Startling Adventures to talk about, but still, any day on the water is a Good Day, indeed.

Just ask my companion.  He'll agree.  He'll even go so far as to tell you that the charter boats plying the same waters hadn't managed to bring in their limits of fish, so it probably didn't matter if we hit the prime fishing grounds or not; being on the water was all that counts.  I'd think he was a heck of a guy if I didn't know what he's really full of.

Oh wait!  There was one Semi-Startling Adventure.  A sea lion poked it's head up out of the water no more than three feet behind Scott's kayak and sighed loudly, as if in solidarity with our lack of fishing success, and while it wasn't hair-raising, it was odd and more than a bit surprising to see.  I'm sure it was the very same sea lion we startled when we passed through the crack in the reef a couple of weeks ago.  Sea lions are known to embrace the idea that turnabout is fair play.

It was the first time I've ever made a No-Go decision after I've launched, and I can say in all honestly that I'm not a fan.  It was humbling.  But sometimes you have to do what's smart, even if it sucks hard and out loud.