San Francisco road trip with very little fishing

We decided not to fly anywhere for the holidays this year. Instead, we road tripped up to San Franciso to visit Steve and Marta. Steve has been telling me for years how seriously they take Christmas, and needless to say we weren't disappointed. If you're unfamiliar with Steve Wozniak, be sure to check out his blog: (https://1000fish.wordpress.com/). For some reason, I appear in a lot of his stories holding a cat. You'll have to ask Steve why that is.

On the drive up we stopped in Santa Clarita to check out a spot for convict cichlid I found on iNaturalist. Lifelist fishing will take you to some interesting locations, and this one happened to be a ditch behind a gas station.



The ditch fed into the Santa Clarita River, which is dry most of the year. So where does this water come from you ask? If you guessed sewage effluent from the nearby waste water treatment plant, you are correct.



The research for this spot paid off, because there were hundreds of convict cichlids here! Armed with a gas station turkey sandwich for bait, I got out my Tenkara gear. Catching a cichlid was no problem, but it took a little bit of time to find one with nice markings for a good lifelist photo.

Convict Cichlid (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) - new hook & line species #650


I was hoping to find a few more exotic releases here, but the only other fish I saw were mosquitofish. The iridescent green and purple made me wonder if it might be something else, but the rows of black spots on the tail are characteristic of mosquitofish.

Western Mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis)


Before left I stuck my camera in the sewage effluent to get some underwater photos of the cichlids. This one should give you a sense of just how many there were. (I washed my camera afterward.)



Up in the bay area we split our time between hanging out with Steve and Marta and seeing a few of the sights. Mostly we just looked at this big red bridge.



As we wandered along the coast we found a sign for a local fish, but it was one that could not be caught. No swimming, wading, or microfishing allowed in the lagoon.



The next day we said our farewells and headed south. We stopped in Monterey and walked around the Cannery Row part of town. John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors, and this quote seemed fitting for the tidepools we planned to visit in the afternoon.



After lunch we drove through Pebble Beach and stopped at a tidepooling spot right in time for low tide. We couldn't stay long, but it looked promising!



The tidepools here were full of life - snails, crabs, sea stars, octopodes, and of course, fish. The color theme for the vegetation in the pools was dark maroon and light pink.



My hope was that I could find something besides woolly and tidepool sculpin. I wasn't sure what species would be most common at this spot, but I had a sinking feeling it would be tidepool sculpin, which is what I caught in northern California a year and a half ago. However, when I keyed them out back at home, I found they were rosy sculpin, a new one!

Rosy Sculpin (Oligocottus rubellio) - new hook & line species #651


View of the rosy sculpin top.



And view of the rosy sculpin bottom.



The sculpins all looked to be the same species, so I focused my last 15 minutes on trying to catch a clingfish or pricleback. Finding them was no problem, but getting them to bite was. Finally, when I ran out of time, I picked up a clingfish so I could at least get a picture.

Northern Clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus)


I've always thought that line that looks like a big frown was the clingfish's mouth, but I learned something new when I held up this one. The real mouth is actually below it! It's hard to unsee that frowny face though, haha.




We wanted to leave the tidepools in time to see the view at Big Sur, and we made it just in time. We crossed the iconic bridge along California 1 and parked at one of the pull-offs to watch the sunset.



There's a lot of Californian coast between San Diego and San Francisco, and someday I'd really like to explore it more with time to figure out the local fishing along the way. Hopefully I'll be back soon!