Tom invited Ruoxi and I to come out and join him and Steve last night. I left my gear at home so I wouldn't get distracted by smaller fish, and Tom and Steve each had one long rod out. I think Steve had the first nibble, but Tom had the first fish actually on.
After initially saying it was a shark, he quickly changed his mind based on how it was fighting.
It was a big bat ray. I think Tom said 100+ lbs. I'll let him fill in the details.
Quick release after the photo.
Apparently Steve caught and released a leopard shark while Tom was fighting the ray. We have no photo evidence though, so we'll never know if he's telling the truth! Steve seemed to get a few more bites than Tom, but none of them were the big sharks they were looking for. This kelp bass was pretty big though!
Both guys had sharks on a few times during the night, but each time they came unbuttoned in the surf. Here's Tom right after he lost tension on his line.
Steve continued working on his species tally for the night with this moray. I thought it was awesome, Steve and Tom wanted nothing to do with it.
As the night was getting late, the guys became laser focused on bringing a shark in. Here's Steve with his unbelievably terrifying game face.
The last fish of the night was this foul hooked brown smoothhound. It's head was about the same size as the mackerel head being used as bait!
I also wandered off at one point and discovered a tidepool with several species of fish. I'm really stoked about the find, because I can come back and target them with microfishing gear to hopefully add three or four species to my lifelist. I have no shame in going after super tiny fish.
Tom says this one is a zebra perch, which is a fish not often caught by anglers.
Here's a small sculpin or blenny. There were half a dozen of them in the pool, and each had different patterns. They might all be the same species though.
I remembered that my camera is waterproof, so I stuck it under water to get better photos. Here's a pair of pale colored opaleye.
And here are some more darkly colored opaleye and a big sculpin with white hairs. They were all packed together under an overhanging shelf.
The one fish that I didn't get a good photo of was a blenny or sculpin, completely jet black, and he was doing little mating dances until I scared him with the camera light. I think that's his head in the left part of the photo.
This last photo doesn't have any fish, but I really like it because of how colorful everything is. It made me feel like a kid again seeing all this stuff!
