Malibu Grunion 07-20-2012

My buddy Brian and I wanted to fish the grunion run which was slated to start at around 10:30 PM so we headed to my special spot in Malibu. We arrived at about 7:45 PM and set up shop on the rocks. I came pretty light on the bait front, only taking squid and a couple perch. Things started out pretty slow, but started to pick up closer to sunset. I caught the first fish of the night, which was a small leopard shark on squid around 8:45 PM or so. After that I caught a small rockfish on a chunk of BSP around 9:30 PM or so. Brian hooked into something very big that broke him off after a short run. He re-baited and went right back out. A short time later he was hooked up again. Whatever it was peeled off line so fast I thought I was going to see smoke from his reel, lol. After about a 5 minute battle he got it up on shore...but it was about 100' North of where we were and there was no beach in between, only slick rocks. After falling once trying to get over to the fish it broke the line when I was about 50' from it. I could not see what it was unfortunately. Brian caught a nice 13+" sargo on squid around 11:30. At around 11:45 I headed down to the area with beach still exposed to see if any grunion were around. I saw two right away but nothing after that. Tried one of them as live bait which got a couple tugs before losing the bait, but didn't catch anything. We packed it in around 12:30 AM. Great night of fishing, too bad the big one got away (probably a bat ray, but possibly a white sea bass).