Deep Sea Fishing!

Second day of LA trip:

We got up early Sunday morning to go fishing. We were pretty impressed with ourselves that 5 of us were able to make it out the door (with one bathroom) before 6:30 am! The boat headed out at 7:30 for 30-45 minutes before finding a good place to fish.

Seals and birds lined the rocks on our way out to the middle of the ocean! (Ok - It wasn't the middle, but it felt like it!)

Fishing poles were ready and the boat was rockin!

The morning was overcast and chilly. I was glad to have a long-sleeve t-shirt on and a light jacket to cut the wind. The sun eventually came out and fried my neck! In this picture the deckhand is flinging bait overboard to get the fish stirred up and hungry . (This is actually only a guess as to why he was throwing bait over people's heads. I basically had no idea what was going on most of the time. Deep sea fishing is a lot different that pond fishing from the bank. And I have only done that a hand full of times!)

Tyler and Craig were nice enough to bait my hook many times. (Several of my pictures aren't very good, but I blame it on the rocking of the boat and my queasiness!)

Craig baiting my hook with squid. The next day we ate calamari that looked strangely familiar!

Tyler caught many fish...like 7 or 8. He was definitely on a roll. I didn't understand it - his line was 2 feet from mine and I wasn't catching any! Finally he told me that my line probably wasn't on the bottom, told me what to do differently, and then 5 minutes later - I finally caught one! I only caught one the entire time, but I was happy to at least catch one. We mainly caught sculpin fish. They measured the fish and if it was over 10 inches, we kept it. We ended up with about 3 fish, but gave them to another couple that was fishing next to us.

Amanda caught several. Ben, to her right, also had good luck catching several.

Another beautiful, spiny sculpin! Craig found out the hard way that these fish aren't like Indiana bass that you can grab and take off the hook. He found out after he had his hand around it that it was venomous! His hand itched the rest of the morning, but apparently it wasn't too bad.

As we made our way back to the shore, the deckhands filleted the fish. The "extra parts" got thrown overboard and made for a great seagull and seal lunch. As we were fishing, we had a couple seals that would swim around our boat hoping to eat our bait before it got to the bottom.

Overall it was a great experience! I'm glad we got to go and experience something new that you can't do in Indiana!