On The Trail Of Stripers With The Legendary Jim Smith   By: Cal Kellogg July 21, 2009 More Articles by Cal

A fresh breeze out of the west combined with the surge of a substantial incoming tide pushed the Happy Hooker forward at a brisk pace.

“Okay, guys ,get your hooks baited, “Captain Jim Smith’s voice crackled over the boat’s speakers. “When I tell you to drop your gear, drop it right away. This is a really small spot. It’s just one big rock that comes out of 60 feet of water and reaches up to within about 20 feet of the surface. As fast as we are drifting our gear will be in the zone for less than a minute,”

Most of the guys on the boat were baited up with live anchovies. A few were using live sardines. The hook on my light Berkley Cobalt rod was baited with a frisky palm-size shiner that I’d found in the tank with the sardines.

When Captain Smith gave us the word, I spooled the shiner to the bottom off the portside corner of the boat’s stern. Almost immediately I felt my sinker come up against the rock. I retrieved line and focused on walking the 6-ounce torpedo sinker over the rock.

My rig was nearing the top of the rock when it happened. One second I was methodically working my gear. The next second the rod was doubled over and 30 pound braid was disappearing from the spool of the Abu Garcia C3 at an alarming rate. “Fish on,” I yelled as the striper surged up the portside on a blistering run…
Wow I’ve really gotten ahead of myself. I hooked the fish I just described on the second to last drift of the day on June 25. We’ll get back to that fish a little later.

The fishing trip for myself and the other 20 anglers aboard the Happy Hooker started out under a cloud of uncertainty at just after 6 o’clock that morning when Captain Smith motored the boat away from the Berkeley Marina’s live bait dock.

“The weather forecast has been calling for strong winds, but according to the buoy reports conditions are decent out on the ocean,” Smith told me. “There are stripers on the beaches to the south of San Francisco. I think we’ll take a gamble and see if we can find a school of big beach bass.”

After clearing the Golden Gate, we proceeded down the coast in choppy, but fishable seas. We spotted birds working in several areas just to the south of Thornton Beach. We tried backing into the surf and tossing live baits in several different areas to no avail. Eventually we found ourselves off Linda Mar at slack tide.
After spending slack tide targeting big black rockfish on an offshore reef, we headed back up the coast when the incoming tide got going, once again hunting for a school of bass.

It was about 1 o’clock when we motored back into the bay with a pair of halibut to about 16 pounds, a handful of rockfish and one big, bad tempered Dungeness crab in the box.

The lack of action we’d experienced throughout the morning combined with the slow reports we got from boats that had remained in the bay was certainly discouraging, but I was anxious to see what Smith’s next move would be. Veteran skippers like Smith always have a trick up their sleeves when the going gets tough.

Captain Jim Smith has been fishing San Francisco Bay and the coastal waters beyond the gate for 42 years. In that time he had earned the enviable reputation of being among the Bay Area’s most talented live bait skippers.

When Smith set a course for Alcatraz, I figured we were going to give Mel’s Reef a shot despite the fact that other boats had fished it earlier with poor results, but Smith threw me a curve. Instead of drifting the reef, he guided the boat on a drift across the western face of Alcatraz, a maneuver that Bay Area skippers refer to as the “suicide drift”, since it requires the skipper to guide the boat between Alcatraz and a rocking projection that lies about 100 yards off the island’s northwestern side.

At times big numbers of stripers hold along the jagged base of the island. As soon as our gear made contact with the rocks, the majority of us got hit and a number of bass were hooked. Clearly, the bass were present and hungry!

For the next 90 minutes we made drift after drift. We caught bass on nearly every drift and on a couple of occasions we had 8 to 10 fish hooked up at once. Most of the bass were in the 6 to 8 pound class, but there were some larger bass mixed in along with a few keeper-size halibut.

As the afternoon went on, the bite gradually slowed down and eventually died. At that point we could have called it a day and no one would have been disappointed. However, we were 5 bass short of full limits and Smith was determined to end the day will limits.

“When there are fish at Alcatraz there are usually some fish on the rocks at Angel Island. We’ll head over there and see if we can fill out our limits,” announced Smith as he steered us across the channel separating the two islands.

Our first drift at Angel Island produced a pair of bass. On the next drift I hooked the bass I started to describe at the beginning of this story.

To make a long story shorter, the bass took me almost all the way up to the bow before reversing its field and taking me back down the portside and across the stern. Once we reached the stern, I could feel the fish weakening. The fight wasn’t over, but instead of making long runs away from the boat the fish tried it’s best to stay on the bottom and the fight became a vertical wrestling match. The 14 pounder was hooked solidly and eventually succumbed to the energy robbing flexibility of the Cobalt rod.

On the next drift we filled out our limits and Smith set a course for the Berkeley Marina. It had been a remarkable day. For me it will always be remembered as the day that the legendary Jim Smith pulled limits of stripers out of thin air when most other boats had mediocre scores at best!