Clamming was amazing! When I opened the door to step on Roosevelt Beach the clams lined up and literally started jumping into my car. I had to slam the door before the 16th one jumped in! Alright, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But the clamming was red hot. Quarter-sized holes, and tops of siphons, were all along the surf line two hours before low tide. I was about a mile south of the Roosevelt Beach entrance and you could limit as fast as you could dig 'em-- nice big ones too!

The surf was very powerful today—had a huge kick, but the surf perch fishing bite was very on. I was having kind of an off-day though. I arrived to the beach around 1 pm, got my pole rigged up and the cooler out of the trunk. I heard a "crunch" after closing my trunk. Hmmm. Trunks don't go crunch... but apparently rods do when you foolishly leave them leaned up against your car and they slide down to the trunk hinge! My surf rod is already very beat-up (it's a retired steelhead noodle rod), but it completely split in two-- nasty unclean break too. Two attempts to salvage most of the rod with minor cutting and some funky old tape in my car proved unsuccessful as nearly half my rod would go sailing into the surf after a couple casts. So I ended up having to do some major cutting and MacGyver the rod together by zip-tying two of the eyes to each other, and smothering the monstrosity with tape (pictured). My poor rod is over a foot shorter now and missing two (more) eyes.

I blew well over an hour walking into the surf from my car, and "repairing" my Franken-rod. I was rewarded though, with the biggest redtail surf perch I've caught in about a year and a half. For bait I was using razor clam necks. I was putting my second one on when whamm-o! Either a big wave or a mac truck snuck up on me. Completely drenched I looked at my left hand holding the bait bag to see all 14 remaining necks had been knocked into the surf... At this point I came in and got my easy limit of clams.

Back at the car I grabbed a bag containing five Berkeley Gulp shrimp from a previous trip and headed back out. I ended up catching four more big surf perch and released three under-sized Dungeness crabs clinging to the artificial plastics. To my surprise, they were actually chowing down on them. I did have my third fishing coronary of the day when another big wave (saw this one coming but just had to prep for impact) knocked my stringer containing two fish, as well one fish in-hand that I just landed, off of my person. Luckily, I had not unhooked the fish in-hand yet (to my surprise) and recovered it, and after a minute of intense searching in rib-high murky water I saw something silver being dragged across the bottom— and managed to snatch the stringer, fish intact. I left the beach around 4:15 pm.

Great day, but not an easy one!

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