David Siskind | Sunday, 13 July 2025
One thing led to another. Our downstairs neighbor’s bathroom ceiling fell into their commode on Saturday night. The possibility of mold led to panic. For reasons I won’t go into here, moving out for a mold mitigation and plumbing repair would be logistically onerous. I was on call for jury duty starting Monday and rescheduling options on the website portal were closed out the previous Friday evening. My landlord wanted me to be available to host an environmental contractor, so despite ideal tides and swell I had to postpone any plans to fish the playa. All this sorted itself out by Thursday afternoon so I hit the beach Friday and Saturday. I had shots. I saw corbina surfing the secondary waves into the beach but caught nothing. I ran into my new buddy John Deitch both days and chatted some more. Turns out we both know Paul Arden. What are the odds? I’m not sure how but they connected over John’s now-defunct YouTube project HookTV, 16 or 17 years ago. Small world.
Apparently John knows everyone on the beach. Today I found him fishing the troughs and holes at the southern end of my pet stretch, near a young fellow I’d seen walking past me early as I fished the flat at the north end. There was also a fellow wearing blue and gray camo casting nearby. Camo-guy caught my attention. He had set up 20 to 30 feet above the high water-line, staring intently at the water and was clearly sight fishing to targets in the pooled and receding water over the sandbar outside of the troughs. He was making quick short casts, at most 40-50 feet, and quick retrieves. I could not easily see his targets but set up to the south trying to see fish the way he was seeing them. I watched and noticed John and the kid were fishing the same way. I was only barely and rarely seeing signs of fish. Just a hint of nervous water and sometimes a shadow that could just as easily have been kelp, but I tried to do it too.
It turns out Camo-guy was Glenn Ueda, out of Orange County. Glenn is well known as the best corbina fly-guy in Southern California. We were all skunked but Glenn, who caught four. Clearly he is someone to emulate. So, like a good fan-boy I went over and introduced myself. I complimented his aggressive approach and told him he was fishing to fish I couldn’t see. He said, “time on the water.” The SoCal corbina flyfishing community is loose but beyond friendly and generous, sharing advice and flies freely. High holing isn’t a thing. It’s a funny fishery where the fish and water move and it’s hard to ruin a spot for someone else. The fish are difficult to catch and they don’t get a ton of pressure. The shots are quick and consistent success is for the elite. I’m hoping with time and effort I can get good enough at this to share the experience with others. I think I will recalibrate my approach. I’ll target anything that could possibly be a fish and will then learn better how to see all of them and only then how to feed them.
David Siskind