Personal Best Yellow and a long story.

[CKallday71]

So I wake up at 2AM for the long pilgrimage to La Jolla from the Inland Empire. I loaded the night before but was running late. By the time I get there, unload and set up the sun is already peeking over the horizon and a chilling realization strikes me as I realize in my packing I forgot a significant piece of gear, my tackle bag. Yup, made it two hours south and left my box sitting in my bedroom. Serious Homer Simpson moment. Only gear I had was what was left in my PFD that I pocketed from the last time out. My terminal tackle consisted of two hooks, one 4 inch waxwing, and a YoYo iron in blue/white. D'oh!

So I get ready for launch and take the stroll down the beach and notice that this is the first tine I've ever seen surfers catching waves here. Yea, this is going to be a wet launch. I waited in the waves for almost half an hour hoping they would dial down a bit. They didn't. Eventually I said F'it and plunged through. Fortunately it was warm today so drying off didn't take long.

Making bait was easy. Perfect lively green back macs were plentiful. It wasn't windy yet so I made my way out to the typical stomping grounds with a Mac pinned on one of the two hooks I had in my possession. I stopped on a couple of meter marks and dropped iron for nothing except a small calico that tried to eat the iron that was only slightly smaller than he was. I'm always impressed by Calicos ability to completely disregard reality in relationship to food size.

There were a couple other yakers out and some private boaters, but not a lot. I had my Mac soaking and dropped iron, honestly when this happened I was clearing a birds nest, when my rod with the Mac started to twitch. I quickly pulled up the iron and by the time I had that rod in a holder my other was in full sing. Lever up on the Avet and the hook is set. Line starts stripping off against the drag and the smile on my face is huge. Twenty minutes of back and forth an I can see color, I nearly crap myself, so does the fish because as soon as he sees my fat ass looking over the side of my kayak he bolts for the bottom again.

Fortunately his second wind wasn't all that and about ten minutes later I was feeling that awesome feeling of gaff sinking into fish. Here's where my next realization hit me. Sitting next to my tackle at home is my game clip. D'oh! Moment#2 I took the para cord off my kelp clip and fashioned a stringer. This brought up a problem I've never had before. Where the heck am I going to stow a fish this big? I ended up pedaling over to another yaker (Arie?) and after a conversation with him and the gigantadog that was following me around I ended up putting the fish inside my outback.

At this point the wind was picking up and really ripping the whitecaps. After the launch this morning I was really not looking forward to landing. The swells and the wind just made everything bad at the beach. Sand was picking up in clouds and surf was certainly UP. I managed to land with a minimal amount of disaster and when I pulled the fish out of my hatch a small crowd gathered around. I figured most of these people would have seen a Yellowtail before.

I didn't weigh the fish but nose to the deepest part of the fork was 39 I he's and FAT! I really need to find a fishmonger for beasts like this because my skill with a fillet knife is not up to the challenge.

Sorry for the long story, if you made it this far you must be really bored!