After a couple weeks straight of 6 day work weeks, I was surprised with 4 straight days off. The rain and swell turned me off of yesterday, but after all that, I was hoping for some good sand movement. I was going to head south tonight, but when I drove out of my neighborhood to head to the beach, I turned left instead of right, so instead of a simple u-turn I said "welp, north it is!"
Arrived around 7:30pm. There were still some larger sets coming through but mostly manageable swell. Some sand had left the beach, but there weren't the troughs that I was hoping to find. Full moon and clear skies made for some great night visibility.
A jet stream illuminated by the moon:
Started with half macks, but those barely got touched, so I went with an all-or-nothing approach with whole mackerel. After about 90 minutes of zero action, I was reeling in a little slack from the waves when line started peeling off. 5-10 minutes later I have a ~36" bat ray on the sand.
Thought about keeping it for bait but it was a little big for my personal taste, and I probably have a month or two worth already in the freezer anyway.
Next cast, 10 minutes in or so, I noticed some slack in the line. I pulled the line taught with my hands to get a feel for what was going on and I could feel something bumping around. Figured I'd wait for it to pull tight before I pull the rod out of the holder, but it never took back more than a couple feet. Finally decided to reel tight to find my bait chewed up.
I put the clean cuts in the side, but whatever it was ate the left fillet off the bait.
That being the last of my mackerel, I switched over to my ray strip for the finale. Nothing on that for 40 minutes, packed up at 10:30pm, about 20 minutes after the peak high. While packing up, my phone dropped out of the chair's pocket and it took me til I got back to the car to realize my phone was in the sand. Little scare but I found it no problem. I'll be out again tomorrow night.
