David Siskind | Sunday, 7 September 2025
Labor day has passed. The prime corbina season is slipping away. I don’t have a lot of good shots remaining this year. I’m sad. I extended my range a little and drove up to a beach north of Ventura. Surfline had predicted a small low-energy swell but, alas, the swells were two feet anyway and came in every which way. I fished the quarter moon so the tide was a bit too high and the beach too steep throughout the morning to allow fish to feed leisurely. Also I got there a little late. But as I walked the beach I immediately spotted some backs and fins amidst the chaos. But when the waves are energetic and inconsistent it’s hard to follow the fish or predict exactly where they’ll pop up. I was reduced to fishing the water with a pinkish-orange corbina crack fly. I hooked up once but lost the fish after a couple of runs. My take away is that the fish are often in tight and feeding but conditions dictate whether they can be spotted. They’re in there. God knows what they’re doing and how they’re feeding. Thank goodness casting is a pleasure and that it’s not insane to fish the water.
While covering the water, I make sure I’m still casting to targets. There are lessons learned on such a day. One that makes me cranky is that my running line tends to pick up fine sand and the line makes crunchy noises as I haul. I hate the crunchy noises but I haven’t found a way to clean the rod guides or the running line at the beach. That’s something to work on. Another is that my tracking is often poor - all that casting exposes flaws in technique which impact my ability to fish every cast efficiently. I need to get better.
Inconsistency impedes accuracy, and line control. To catch fish I have to be able to execute a plan. To execute I have to fish the fly where I want to. Inconsistent tracking looms large for me - flies kick right or left, energy is lost as the fly leg crosses the loop plane - sometimes more than once. I have come up with various exercises to increase awareness of the SLP and to smooth the application of power but in the end delivering a fly effectively is a skill that can best be learned directly by casting to targets. I think I’ve neglected target practice out of fear and delusion. Fear of the metrics and what they’re going to tell me. And my delusion that casting randomly to clumps of grass substitutes for a more formal accuracy practice.
So I have brought my little hula-hoops back out. Besides my warm up and running through the gears at the end I’m concentrating on hitting the targets with standard, pull-back, and stopless strokes around the clock. To stay positive and to avoid ingraining erroneous strokes, I’m keeping the practices short. I’ve been at it for a week and am still finishing at 45 feet or so. I’m hovering the fly over the target before landing it. Tracking has to be good to score. Metrics are available and improving. And, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, the effects on all casts have been satisfying. I’ve been learning something that I’m not explicitly practicing.
Moon is right, obligations are out of the way. I should get one or two more beach days before heading East Wednesday.
David Siskind