Surf Fishing Dana Point Area 05-26-2012

My buddy Hammer and his buddy Polo showed up to my house a little behind schedule, but pretty close to the scheduled time of 5:30 AM and we were on our way by 5:50 AM. After stopping somewhere off the 5 freeway to pick up Polo's uncle we were on our way to the Dana Point Area. After stopping in at the gas station for snacks and to drop off our gear we started what ended up being a hell of a long walk to the spot. I am pretty sure it was over a mile, not so far, but it was rough walking, lol. After passing by several fishy looking areas that I will be back to fish soon, we arrived at our spot at the point at around 8:25 AM. I started out with a double dropper loop with squid and octopus on them and knew I would be switching out to a single as soon as I lost this setup which was not very long, lol. After switching to a single I moved to the tip of the point and cast out with octopus. After a few casts flinging my shore crabs off the hook before they hit the water, I switched to muscles and cast where Polo's uncle suggested I cast. I got constant hits when casting to this spot, but time after time they just striped the bait off without setting the circle hook. Hammer hooked into something large, but it took him into the kelp and got off after about 10 minutes. After moving North of the point where polo said there were lots of small perch I switched to a sabiki tipped with muscle and within seconds I had my first fish of the day, a decent sized walleye perch. Caught a ton of the small fries while eyeballing the cove that I will be back to fish hard (video below). I did not feel like losing a bunch of rigs today, but there are rockfish, cabazon and possibly lings in there for sure. Kept a bunch of the decent sized walleyes and a senorita fish (what I knew as soon as I saw that they were around were the culprits stealing my bait) and a few small black perch. After sharing a great burrito that uncle made for lunch Polo and Hammer were both catching small perch and his uncle kept on catching Garibaldi. Every time we were excited at a large fish being on, then disappointed as soon as we saw the orange. We called it a day at around 3:30 PM. The swell was large all day, which is suspect had something to do with the bigger perch hiding. After packing up while his Uncle cleaned the catch he felt like taking and releasing all of the small perch in the holding pool we were on our way back on the long trek to the car. We saw a dead sea slug and a large dead female sheep-head (fish) on the shore. I also took a nice tumble at the end of the rocks where a bunch of dead dried kelp attracted millions of bugs as I tried to hurry by.

It was a great day of fishing, scouting a few new locations along the way and seeing some nice ladies along the way as usual, lol. Hammer also purchased his year license, so we will hopefully be doing this more often.

Lot of pics and a video of a cove I will be back to fish below: