Hey Ken! 'Just beach' includes cool fly fishing
Hitting the surf with a fly rod for the first time opens a whole new can of worms
SANTA MONICA BEACH — If “just beach” could be my job for a few more days, I wouldn’t mind.
It worked for Ken; why not me?
Pardon the Barbie Movie reference, but I happened to both see the just-released movie and stand on Santa Monica Beach this week, so it’s unavoidable.
If you haven’t seen the movie, Ken—purposeless without Barbie—experiences an existential crisis. Lacking a job description, the character played by Ryan Gosling hilariously declares, “My job is just beach.”
Not lifeguard, “that is a common misperception,” the characters solemnly agree—amusingly.
Ken watches the beach scene; that’s his thing. At the end of the road, Route 66, I found some fly fishers whose beach job is the coolest. They hit the surf with fly rods and barbell-weighted feathered hooks in pursuit of fish that, before this week, I couldn’t have named but now can’t wait to pursue.
Running a Route 66 trip back home to Tulsa after a California birthday celebration with my 95-years-young mother, I started with a detour up The 405 to Van Nuys and the Fishermen’s Spot, the only fly-fishing specialty shop in Los Angeles County. And that brought me to an early Wednesday morning with one of SoCal’s surfcasting gurus, a true character named Frank Vargas. He was kind enough to take a few hours with me as he packed up to head toward trout streams in Montana.
It didn’t take long to recognize that owners Ken Lindsay and Steve Ellis have created a SoCal fly-fishing community anchor in their establishment of more than five decades of history and expertise to match. The lifeblood of the shop, its ties to area anglers of all stripes, who cast lines for all varieties of fish from the LA River to Russia to British Columbia, pulses through the place.
David Shaffer met me at the counter. He grew up just around the corner and has worked the shop off and on since he was a teenager, save a stint with Orvis and another local shop that came and went.
He said The Spot opened a few doors down in the 1970s as an all-purpose fishing shop. It offered everything from deep-sea tackle and custom rods to tiny flies and ultra-fine sticks for Sierra Mountains streams. In 2001 it moved to its current home and turned exclusively to fly fishing.
Corbina is the name of the fish that hit my radar as I turned it toward LA. I had to confess to Shaffer that the fish’s name only rang a bell with me. I knew I’d seen or read something about Corbina, probably in a magazine, but I had no idea what it was.
Among those with ties to the shop is Al Quattrocchi (kwah-troak-key). Everyone calls him “Al Q.” Shaffer walked me to a line of books on a shelf written by Al Q, “The Corbina Diaries.” It’s a sweet, slick book—and hard to find elsewhere. It chronicles all he’s learned in pursuit of these silver torpedo-like critters that prowl the beach surf in small packs and snarf up mussels and sand crabs (or sand fleas) roughly between May and October. However, Shaffer said that the “beans” are late this year, and action is just now genuinely picking up in the past few weeks.
Shaffer connected me with angler/guides Glenn Ueda of So Cal Flats Fishing, Lee Baermann of Fly Fish The Surf, and Frank Vargas of Frank’s Fly Shack.
I played phone tag with Ueda (pronounced you-ATE-uh) and had a long talk with Baermann, who holds claim to teaching Vargas in his early years and also authored a book titled, you guessed it, “Fly Fish the Surf.” Baermann also has a patent on his brand of fast-sinking, easy-casting fly lines designed for the surf.
I’ll write more about Glenn and Lee elsewhere.
Vargas, who also worked at The Spot for a few years and is now with Patagonia, agreed to meet me at Santa Monica Beach at 5:30 a.m. Conditions were less-than-perfect with a not-quite-right tide and dense fog, but he was game to give me an intro to the basics.
I learned tons in just two hours with the hard-fishing, hard-working former smoke jumper turned fly-fishing guru thanks to his dad and, after a traumatic brain injury, Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing.
“The real deal was they were just trying to get me out of the house, and Dad always did the Healing Waters thing,” Vargas said as he rigged gear for the morning. “So the deal was ‘your Dad needs some help with Healing Waters’ — but it was helping me.”
Vargas introduced me to this game of timing the tides, reading the surf, understanding the near-shore structure, and timing casts to cut through waves to the sandy bottom where fish prowl the slack between waves. All while avoiding beach-goers with your back cast.
Sight-fishing the surf for “beans” sounds like an exciting visual pursuit, but that was out of the question with the dense fog smothering the beach. So we were doing what they call blind casting.
If you’re a Route 66 angler, SoCal Corbina has to be something to add to your end-of-the-road musts. It’s right there, south of the Santa Monica Pier, or just a few miles north at—get this, Oklahomans—Will Rogers State Beach.
How could you not?
Even if you’re not going to target Corbina (not to be confused with Corvina), casting a line into the surf can turn up a variety of surfperch, small halibut, or even leopard sharks. I’d describe a California corbina, sometimes called California kingcroaker, as something similar to our freshwater drum, crossed with a bonefish.
If you’re a Midwestern fisher like me and think you lack the gear for such a pursuit, think again. Most of these guys were barefoot or wearing sandals or lightweight wading shoes. Most of the time, they stood on the sand or barely knee-deep in the surf. While their gear is beach-tuned, if you can catch trout or bass on your gear, you have the basics needed to catch corbina and leopard sharks.
I would have imagined Vargas showing up with giant surf rods and saltwater reels the size of dessert saucers. Nope. Vargas has been into fiberglass since his dad gave him his first fly rod. At the beach, he only wants an accurate cast with a short leader and fast-sinking line to 45, sometimes 50, or 60 feet. His weapon of choice is an 8-foot Echo Bad Ass fiberglass 6-weight rod.
“It just feels good,” he said of his preference for fiberglass. “Everything slows down. Put a fiberglass rod in your hand, and it makes you slow down. I tell people that out here all the time; just slow down, man.”
With the surf kissing my feet, thundering waves breaking offshore, and the rush and hiss of rollers in between, I began to feel that rhythm and understand the timing. Naturally, I gyrated into it with all the grace of a 13-year-old at his first boy-girl school dance.
But, dammit, I felt that feeling.
Vargas had his reels spooled with a full-sink line designed for surf fishing by Scientific Angler. It shoots like a dream and cuts into the waves with a 5.5 feet-per-second sink rate. Vargas said he typically ties on about 2 or 3 feet of 20-pound-test leader and connects a couple more feet of 10- or 12-pound-test line with a triple-surgeon or blood knot. That’s the basic setup, but it’s sometimes altered to use a longer tapered leader if the fish are super spooky.
Streamers for these fish also get deep fast. Most have barbell eyes for weight, but they are not big flies. Oklahomans would recognize the small chartreuse-over-white Clouser minnows or darker shades in Crazy Charlies that are effective when grunion spawn. More commonly, Vargas throws sand flea imitations like a Surfin Merkin, Corbina Crack, or Razzlers, usually in orange or pink, to match the color of sand flea egg sacks. Vargas ties up some slightly different variations that he believes draw a little more attention.
“Just to give them something a little different from what they always see,” he said.
Any good freshwater reel with a solid drag will do; you just have to keep it clean.
I heard Corbina compared to bonefish and carp. The consistent theme is that catching these fish presents a challenge that heightens skills to new levels.
Shaffer compared the sight-fishing strategy and accuracy of the cast to what is required to chase bonefish on tropical flats. Vargas, who mastered carp fishing in the LA River before hitting the surf, praised carp as a skill-honing quarry but said Corbina cranked those skills even higher.
“It made me better, both carp fishing and beans,” Vargas said. “You get good at either of those and go back to trout, and it feels easy.”
Shaffer warned me of the challenge before I called the beach gurus. “There are a lot of doughnut days fishing for beans,” he said.
I’m all too familiar with doughnut days, but this surf-fishing game? It combines a host of variables and potential frustrations that must make catching a corbina here or there incredibly rewarding. I’ll let you know for sure if I ever catch one.
My first dread was Vargas holding out a stripping basket for me. I’ve only tried using a stripping basket once in my life, and it only lasted about five minutes; I didn’t really need it and didn’t like it. Felt like it was just in the way. But I used one on Wednesday.
“Line management, when you’re getting started, you just have to use (a basket),” Vargas said. “It’s the frickin ringer out there, basically, right? So there’s going to be people behind us, you’re going to be timing the tide, you’re going to be looking for fish, you’re going to be frickin watching for your line, the tide goes in and out, and your line wraps you. You’re going to be trying not to hook yourself, to be honest; there’s just a lot of moving parts going on, so the basket makes it one less thing.”
He was right, of course. And he didn’t say “frickin.”
Watching the ebb and flow of the waves and just timing the lift and launch for my casts was challenging enough. Add the unfamiliarity of the feel with that fast-sinking (5.5-6 fps) line and a borrowed rod, and it all just multiplied. The in-and-out action of waves around my feet washed line that missed my stripping basket to tangle around my feet.
Surf fishing also requires a constantly tight line. The fish essentially hook themselves as a result, so you have to keep that line tight. Have to.
I didn’t.
I just struggled with that ebb-and-flow surf leaving me slack-lined—a lot. With timing the waves, you must also learn to move. You walk backward if you can’t keep that line tight by stripping it in.
It’s all part of the Corbina dance.
If you can manage an excellent cast to start off the dance on the right foot.
Invariably, about the time I felt I had it all together for timing and accuracy of the cast, I’d look over my shoulder to see a jogger headed into my back cast—nothing to do in that case but stop, wait and start all over again.
We saw a few Corbinas, their backs exposed as they rushed back to the surf before the water dropped to leave them high and dry. Other fly-fishers on the beach reported catches of surfperch and one small leopard shark.
For me, I just learned. I listened to the waves, got a feel for the game, whet my appetite for next time, and learned enough to know what Baermann and Al Q are talking about when I read their books.
And then, later, another chance to work the beach at the end of the road will come—because that’s my job.
If you want to connect with Frank, try him at 805-795-8233.