Pacific City this Saturday!

Just curious how big the crab larvae were.  Could be time to tie some flies to match.

I caught my first saltwater fish on a fly rod, with an blue fly shrimp from an old jig. It was a nice 3+ lb black rock fish and was fun to bring in! Caught 2 black rock in quick succession on light rod with Cabellas version of gulp that Cosmo gave me.

One black rock was unusually fat so had to cut it open.  FULL of crab larvae about 1/4” in size and one large squid.  Nobaddays, would love to see a pic of your crab larvae fly.

I caught my first saltwater fish on a fly rod, with an blue fly shrimp from an old jig. It was a nice 3+ lb black rock fish and was fun to bring in!

That is awesome.  So much more fun with a fly rod.  I have never tied a crab larvae fly, but I'm willing to try.

This pattern works fine on a #6 or #8 freshwater nymph hook:

http://www.orvis.com/p/tim-s-mysis-shrimp/18SL?item_code=18SL0120&adv=127748&cm_mmc=plas-_-FlyFishing-_-18SL-_-127748&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjq-lm7Ly2gIVhFqGCh3eZgfzEAQYASABEgLszfD_BwE

Here are my go to flies for when the rockfish are on crab spawn or busting the surface. The 1st picture are my number #1 must go to. First thing "really chart." the crab spawn aren't even close to that color, but it makes your fly stand out from the rest and when you got a billion little crab larva floating in the water you need your pattern to stand above the rest to be notice and notice they do. The next picture is the 2 that I use later on in the year when they're not many around. The 3rd. picture is for when the salmon are amongst the blacks and when you come across salmon surface feeding on krill. The 4th. picture is a gurgler floating pattern in baby herring style.- The blacks go nuts for this one( and so do the lings when they go on a surface bite). The last picture is one big group shot and as you can see everything is super small compared to the gurgler.

Mrs. Redbeard and I had a slow day. We passed over a school of topwater rockfish on our way to a deeper spot, expecting to come back and find them again later. I even had my fly rod with me, Nobaddays! Alas, the classic mantra was true: never leave fish to find fish.

We worked a few marks from last year pretty hard and I ended up getting into 6 or 8 decent sized lingcod (26-28"). But I wanted AOTY points, and I was hoping to coax one out of shallower water later, so didn't keep any of them. I figured I could only keep one big ling out farther, so I still had 1 keeper available if I got one on the fly rod, and I needed that one ling on the conventional tackle to be really big. This is the madness of AOTY.

I ended up with no lingcod in the cooler but luckily Mrs. Redbeard isn't nearly as greedy for points as me, so fish tacos were still had. I still managed a ~19" rockfish so I was happy enough with that.

At some point mid-morning the bite just completely died on us. I didn't see any boats around doing any better, but we kept changing up lures looking for a good combination.

As we worked our way back to the kelp beds closer to the rock we never did find many fish and some of our usual hotspots were completely dead. We downsized our lures significantly and did catch rockfish in the kelp beds which was fun.

We should have just stuck to where we saw fish on the way out, or at least started there. Still, the pull to explore is a strong one, and if I miss out on numbers one day all it takes is tenacity to catch them the next day.

Tight lines!

Thanks for the insight into you flies surf12foot. Had to look up Gurgler!