Saturday March 11, 2017 - Long Beach
Virgin Orbit? I thought it was Virgin Galactic... It was. But we have separated from The Spaceship Company to be our own separate wing called Virgin Orbit. Just a little 411 for you before getting into the nitty gritty of today's post: Fishing!
Stormin' Norman is our local Design Guru and also our unofficial Filipino social chair. Among his pastimes are basketball, karaokee, and fishing! Apparently he organized one of these trips last year but Norm didn't know how cool I was yet so my invitation got lost in the mail. The again, the USPS has become very selective with what mail they will actually deliver. I believe their metric is, if it's junk mail then deliver it; if its super important then forward it to Hogwarts.
Most fishing trips start super early in the morning, this one is no different. We are at the Long Beach fishing pier bright and early at 5:30 am. Though it sucks to have to get up early, its great when all your early alarms are to do fun things, as opposed to it always being for work.
So when you go ocean fishing, you basically have 3 options: fish from the shore/pier, pay a ton of money to go with a small group of people, or pay a little bit to go on a cattle boat with 50-80 people. Being that Norm and I are trying to get people excited about fishing, we went the cheap route. With a 50% groupon, the trip was $27. That's basically free, can't get better than that!
When you go deep sea fishing, you're usually fishing just above the ocean floor, or right near the top. The captain will tell you at what depth the fish are at then you choose which hooks, weights, and type of line to use at that point. Today, we are rockfishing, which means that we are at the bottom of the ocean floor, about 200 feet down. The only knot you need to know for this is a dropper loop for each of your 2 hooks and a weight at the bottom.
Its pretty common to have seals and dolphins come and visit the fishing boats. The dolphins are there to play, the seals are there to steal your fish off your hook. Lucky for us, we had a few dolphins come a play with us in the very calm water we were in.
Time to fish! Shoulder to shoulder on the fishing rail, everyone sends their lines down to the ocean bottom. Steven pulls up a little flatfish, Norm brings up a tiny little rockfish, but after a bit, we all start to hit our stride catching little 8" whitefish. There isn't much of a fight with any of these guys, but its still really exciting to feel the bite and to bend your rod.
With our half day trip wrapping up, and our burlap bags dancing around with our catch, its time to open up the cooler and drink some contraband beer that we snuck onto the boat. I may have started when we started fishing... But hey, what else am I supposed to do until the fish start biting?
Super fun trip with super fun people. Maybe we can convince Virgin to pay for an entire boat trip for just our company. What do you think Norm? Make it happen!
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