Day 3 began with surf fishing and ended with lake swimming. The beach was awesome even though the fishing lacked much excitement – except for right when we started. I had rigged up for whiting and pompano with sand fleas for bait. There was a cross current that made holding difficult so I quickly decided to switch from conventional pyramid style weights to claw style that grab into the sand. I was reeling in the sand flea rig and got fairly close to shore when something came out of nowhere and nabbed the bait. After a nice fight I landed a medium size bluefish. Who ever heard of catching a bluefish on a sand flea while reeling in. So I have to figure that the water is full of ravenous blues and changed over to a killer bluefish lure. Turns out that one blue was it for the day. Did get a small whiting a couple hours later but all in all, the catching was poor. Still we had a great time – the water was the perfect temp so you could stay cool no matter how hot the sun. Eric had never fished before but it wasn’t long before he was casting like a champ.
We stopped for lunch at a really, run down drive-in that has the best fish sandwiches on the globe – if not the best then at least the biggest. The boys can really chow down so I wanted to see them handle these sandwiches which are just too much for either Nancy or me. They did a 95% job but nobody touched a fry or the coleslaw. Then back to the lake for the afternoon swimming. Eric had never been able to dive and wanted to learn so he focused on that and is doing a credible job after only 2 days and a few nasty belly flops. And he caught his first fish – a tiny bream but a fish nonetheless. It’s fun to watch him learn things that Simon and Tommy were doing when they were little kids.
Day 4 included a little wilderness kayaking at a State Park on Pellicer Creek. It’s a salt water marsh area reported to be a good redfish fishery. By the time we got there, it was hot, hot, and even hotter. Plus the wind was blowing fairly well making kayaking a tough go. We toughed it out for a couple of hours and then headed for cooler haunts – that would be back to the lake and the dock.
On the last day, today, the boys decided that they were in internet withdrawal, needed to see the world cup match with Ghana and wanted to spend more time swimming in the lake. I was ok with all of that since Saturday’s tend to be crowded at all the standard recreation areas. Nancy is scheduled home by mid afternoon so we have an hour or so to get some semblance of organization back into the house.
Had my first hiccup with the Virgin Mobile. I’m not sure what happened since someone else was manning the computer but the screen popped up with a message that the device (the modem) was not activated. It was kind enough to give me a phone number to call and a reference number but I was surprised to find that to talk to a human I had to call after 6AM Pacific time. Pacific Time?? What’s that all about? The phone message of course said I could get all kind of good info on the web site but duh, how can I get to the web site if the system is not activated. I did finally hook with the service tech and he got me back working but it sounds like maybe a recurring problem that has to do with the synchronization of equipment at the tower. He explained that there’s a receiving antenna and then a data transmitting antenna and occasional there could be a synchronization problem between them. It’s a nominally simple routine to get things back together and I wrote it all down. He asked me how many bars of signal I had and I told him one. He said that was pretty bad and I told him I was proud to see even one and that somehow that one bar had been carrying me for a couple of weeks.
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