Group,

I went down the street to Doheny State Beach Easter morning and had a ball catching little 7" to 11" barred surfperch along the portion of the beach between the Dana Point Harbor breakwall and the mouth of San Juan Creek. In addition to the BSP's, I battled a smoothhound shark all the way to the beach before it graciously released itself. I estimated the length of the shark at a little under 3 feet, so you can let your imagination run wild with how much fun that fish was to play on a 6 -weight rod! In addition to the smoothhound, I also caught and landed a cute little 20 inch lepoard shark that didn't put up much of a tussle.

I used a first-generation Echo 690-4X 6wt, a WF-7F line, and about 18 feet of 6lb Stren Magnathin spin-fishing mono for a leader to deliver the goods, and the goods I delivered were fiery red Newport Specials in size 6.

"A floating line at an open-coast beach"? you ask....

Yep, you read it right. On the day in question, the waves that did manage to lap up on the shore hardly rated the religious and the along-shore current was nil. There was nothing before me but a nice, flat, calm ocean.

The floating line and long leader method is a specialized one with a limited range of application where fishing open-coast beaches is concerned, but where the conditions are right for it, there isn't a more effective method of achieving the goal of maximum fish contact that I've found. A few of the advantages inherent in using this method are:

1) You're not dragging 27+ feet of high-density sinking line along the bottom, as you are with the standard fast-sinking integrated shooting head and short leader approach. This means that you're not dragging a fly line over a halibut's back on the retreive and your ability to feel subtle takes isn't compromised by the drag of the line on the sand.

2) Your fly isn't being pulled along on a horizontal plane, as it is when fished with a fast-sinking integrated head. Snagging is reduced considerably, particularly at a beach like Doheny, where the bottom component is one of rock reefs and sand, and where there is a substantial amount of river rock deposited from the outflow of San Juan Creek. Becuase the fly is being pulled from above, it has a hopping action on the retrive that halibut find very tough to resist, and you can tune the degree of hop that you get by altering the leader length relative to the depth of the water that you are fishing. Shoreten the leader, and you get more hop out of your fly, provided that the leader is still long enough to let the fly reach the bottom without having to submerge the tip of the fly line to get there. Conversely, if you lengthen the leader, you can tone down the hop effect.

3) When you complete your cast with a floating line, the line will have a little waviness to it when it rests on the surface of the water becuase of coil memory. When you pull on the line to retreive your offering, that waviness disappears, right? And it returns again if you pause your retreive. Now if you aren't pulling on the line, and that waviness begins to disappear, something else is pulling on it on the other end, and that "something else" is a fish. Time to set the hook....

I can't count the number of times that I've heard or read that you can't get bit when fishing from the beach if your fly isn't moving. That, my friends, ain't so. The truth of the matter is that your fly will get hit when it's not moving, but most methods of delivering the goods don't allow you to feel or see that a take has occured during a pause in the retreive. In other words, you do get bit during a pause in the retrieve, but if you can't react to it becuase you didn't know that it happened, it really doesn't count.

With the floating line and long leader, however, you can see takes that you can't even feel. Obviously, the more chances that you have to set the hook in a fish's mouth, the more opportunites you have to catch fishes. When fishing this method, I get over half of my takes during the pause in the retrieve.

"Okay, so what are the disadvantages"?

Well, the first one is that you can't fish open-coast beaches with this method very much, becuase you need ultra-calm conditions for it to work, and those don't happen very often in surf-zone fishing. The second one is that casting weigted flies with 16 to 22 feet of leader seperating them from the head of the fly line ain't the easiest thing in the world to do. But it isn't impossible, either. It just takes practice and for some it takes a lot of practice, but the results are well worth it.

This method works exeptionally well when fishing the sheltered waters of shallow embayments like Alamitos Bay or Mission Bay from the shoreline, or when fishing areas like Long Beach's Belmont Shore, where the beach is protected from surf and swell by a breakwater. It also works well at beaches like South Carlsbad, where you have waves that break a considerable distance from the shore, leaving a vast expanse of roily whitewash to fill in flat-calm troughs and holes near the water's edge. It also works like a champ on those rare days like I encountered at Doheny this past weekend, wherein the waves -if you can call 'em that- are virtually non-existant.

Give this method and honest try under conditions that are appropriate for it, and you'll be a true believer, too.

-JP

_________________
"I fish, therefore I am."

Nice presentation JP. As you correctly mention... the tactic is limited along our California coastline (in terms of days and fishable hours). However it does work beautifully when the planets line up for the angler. Heck my first flyrod surf outing was with a fiberglass rod, full floating line, and 16-20 foot leader. It's all I owned at the time.

I now would prefer to use a slow sinking intermediate line for the conditions you mentioned. This design allows me the same access you have experienced, plus the addition of extended hours when conditions are less than perfect. The sub-surface position of the intermediate line reduces the effct of turbulent surface conditions if wind blows, currents collide, and the tide cycle gets beyond your "mild-to-nil" impact.

Oh well buddy, no sweat, if the conditions allow for a floating line then indeed go for it! I know you're always looking to increase your understanding of the surf game.

Enjoy the surf... and stay safe out there folks.
Cheers, Ken

Jerrold:

I wish I had more opportunities to fish that way. I did have some fun last year dapping a size 12 dry fly for Walleye perch feeding at the mouth of the Pajaro River. They were eating stuff mixed up with Enteromorpha weeds being flushed out of the river. I was laughing hysterically as they charged the fly and flipped out in demented attacks. The following day, I caught a dozen or so using a size 16 nymph on a 4 wt. Jack Smelt can often be cuaght this way, too.

I do fish an intermediate (like Ken mentions) quite often. For Stripers feeding within 12 feet of the shoreline, a clear intermediate does a great job. Too many folks think you need LC13 to fish the suds. Nothing could be further from the truth, eh.

Rob

_________________
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Were you able to predict the calmness of the surf by looking at tide tables, or is the calm surf you experienced just a luck-of-the-draw type of circumstance that cannot be predicted?

Also, for surf conditions that are more typical, would a floating/sink tip line work, or is it better to use a full sink line when there is wave action?

Thanks!

Dave,

On the day in question (Easter '04) I had a fair idea that the surf would be very mild at Doheny, based on a tide chart and the surf report from the previous day that I'd read in The Orange County Register. It's a bit easier for me to "predict" what the surf is like at Doheny before I get there, though, because I can see it from my patio, which is up the hill on the inland side of the I-5 and only about 3/4 of a mile from the beach as the gull flies.

Tide tables are exactly that. They (at least the ones that I use) don't tell you the predicted height of the swell or the direction that it's expected to be coming from. You need to know that information, too. I get that from the "surf report" column of the newspaper and get excited when I see the words "poor shape" and/or "knee-high sets"--in other words, I am rejoicing in the kind of conditions that make my surfer buddies moan. The combination of swell and tide that usually results in calm surf obviously varies from one beach to another, depending on whether the beach faces south, southwest, or west. At my home beaches, a day where you have a fading west swell and a slowly building southwest swell with low swell height and a very weak neap tide sometimes results in flat, calm surf that makes the floating line and long leader method viable, but not always. The ocean always seems to have its own ideas about the face that it's going to present, so yeah, I suppose you could say that I make educated guesses and am blessed with a bit of luck of the draw. I always bring the floating line set-up along, though, precisely because I never know for certain whether the conditions will be right for it, but want to be able to deploy it whenever they are.

For the more typical day-to-day conditions down here, my "go-to" line is a 300-grain fast-sinking integrated head with an intermediate running line portion. I'd rather have the running line cut below the surface, not ride upon it, because it's easier for me to maintain a farily tight and slack-free line that way. The problem with full-sink lines (assuming you meant WF-S) is that they have so much traction on the bottom that it's tough to feel the grab (for me) through the line dragging on the sand. However, I ocassionaly fish with a guy who slings a WF-6S line on a TFO 6-weight, and he does very well with it--always catching fish and plenty of them. Then there's my wife, who fishes with freshwater sink tip lines (old SA 13-foot type IV for a 5weight) on her Loomis GL-2 and "swings" a San Juan Worm through the troughs that form at water's edge at places like South Carlsbad or sometimes right down the road at Doheny. She catches a lot of surfperch that way, too, and she usually doesn't cast more than 30 or 40 feet to do it.

Your results, of course, may vary.....

Blessings and Tight Lines,
--JP

_________________
"I fish, therefore I am."

JP,

Thank you for the very informative follow-up!

If you would forbear a couple more questions, is the water warm enough to wet wade now, or should a person wear waders? (I understand that stockingfoot waders will get trashed due to sand getting into the boots, and therefore bootfoot waders are preferred.)

Finally, are you aware of the URL for any "surf cams" for the beaches you fish -- surf cams that actually work, that is?

Thanks again.

Dave Culver

Dave,

I've never tried any of those "surf cam" sites, so I can't help you out much, there.

On the subject of waders, I'll offer the following....

Because I live where I do, just up the hill from the Pcaific Coast Highway exit off the I-5, most of the fishing that I do is along the Orange County coast. The advantage to my situation is that the fishing is usually pretty good and I don't have to travel very far for it. The downside is that many of the beaches here are prone to bacteria contamination. This is particularly true at those beaches that are near a source of freshwater outflow, whether it be from a flood-control channel, storm drain, powerplant coolant channel, creek, or what have you. That, my friend, pretty much covers most of the better spots.

So I wear waders nearly all of the time. I'm not using anything fancy, either--Hodgeman "Wadelite" breathables with stocking feet. I slip on a pair of "Aquasocks" over them instead of flats booties, dive booties, wading shoes, and the like.

I like the Aquasocks because, well, they're cheap. I bought my last pair at Sportmart for less than $7.00. These are a little neoprene slipper type shoe used by a variety of watersports enthusiasts. They don't have laces to come undone by the churning of the waves. They conform tightly to the foot, which helps keep sand from getting caught between the stockingfeet of the waders and the shoes. Plus, since they are a shoe, rather than a boot, I can swim pretty well with them on, if I need to. Oh, yeah, did I mention that they're cheap? I wear a size 11 hiking boot, but gotta buy size 13 Auquasocks to have 'em big neough to get over the neoprene stocking feet of my waders.

The short answer is that I don't personally like bootfoot waders and don't use them, but I don't like getting rashes in interesting places, either, so I'm in stockingfoot waders just about always when I'm fishing the surf.

--JP

_________________
"I fish, therefore I am."

JP,

You are truly a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for sharing your recommendations.

Dave C