RE: OR Coast Report

[Tim Harris]

Title: Message

I use a 7-weight just because I have a 5-piece that I can carry easy with all the gear in our van but a 6 would be good too.  I think a 300 grain head would probably overpower anything lighter though you could probably do a 200 grain on a 5-weight.  They are basically a turbo-charged bluegill and put up a good pull given their size though they don’t make runs like a corbina in SoCal will.  The NW surfperch are quite a bit bigger than the SoCal ones so at least you get a much better fight from them.     Basically you wade out as far as you are comfortable and safe, in the NW I only wade to where I get hit from knee to low-thigh by a “normal” wave, at times I get hit crotch high.  The fish like the edges of rips which can be pretty dangerous, especially on an ebb tide.  The further south you go the safer and warmer it is so you can wade out a bit more and deeper, in San Diego I’ll be getting hit in the chest with the occasional big wave.  I try to walk a beach at low tide to see the troughs and slots and any structure that the fish can use and then go back to fish those areas.  In SoCal you can look for the surfers because they find the spots that hold the perch in the slots they paddle out in or I find them when I fall off my boogie board and end up in deeper water.  To fish you cast out, let the line and fly sink, and start stripping back when the flood is in and letting the line feed out during the suck.  I do a twitchy, bonefish like retrieve but with no stopping.  After a while you get a feel for it.  I like to cast right at the base of one wave and then the fly will usually suck out a bit right away and sink better then you can start retrieving when the next wave starts to hit.   Oh yeah, you NEED a stripping basket, I do this about 10 days a year and still spend about ¼ of my time untangling line.  For flies all you need is an orange or red bonefish style fly.  They eat Pacific Mole Crabs for the most part and the crabs carry and orange/red egg sack and scoot on the bottom.   I use the Surfpercher Red a lot in the NW, it is basically a Crazy Charlie with dumbbell eyes, a yellow marabou tail and a red marabou wing and a red or gold diamond braid body.  Further south I use more sand shrimp and ghost shrimp flies.      A good intro to surfperch fishing can be found in John Shewey’s “NW Fly Fishing – Trout and Beyond” book, that is what got me first interested.   There is also good information on it in several of Ken Hanley’s books – “Fly Fishing the Pacific Inshore” and “Fly Fishing Afoot in the Surf Zone” - and he’s written some articles in SW Fly Fisher magazine on the subject.   You can find surfperch from the tip of the Olympic Penninsula down through Baja, I’ve gotten them in Washington, Oregon, NoCal and SoCal and just haven’t hit Baja on the Pacific side yet.  In SoCal you can get shots at corbina also which are about as hard as permit to catch, I’ve landed one in probably 15 days fishing down there.  You can also get flounder and shovelnose guitarfish (sand sharks) on the beaches there and you foul hook a lot of stingrays instead of Dungeness crabs.     I do need to take a few of these to eat one time, I’ve heard they are pretty good.  I’m going camping down there again in late August so I’ll probably whack a few for dinner then.   Tim   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Steudel Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 6:32 PM To: waflyfishers@waflyfishers.com Subject: RE: OR Coast Report   Cool report, how well do they fight. Did you use a 5 - 6 wt?   Did you just wade out into the surf and fish? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tim Harris Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 5:27 PM To: waflyfishers@waflyfishers.com Subject: OR Coast Report I just returned from a trip to Arch Cape on the Oregon Coast.  Each morning I got up at 5 – 5:30 and hit the beach for surfperch for a few hours and this year did very well.   I fished Cannon Beach the first day and got two perch in the first 15-20 minutes from 5:45-6:00 and one was the biggest surfperch I’d ever seen let alone caught, the thing had to be pushing 2.5 - 3 lbs.   I hit the same water the next morning and got a few normal sized perch.  Along with perch I would foul hook about 2-3 Dungeness Crabs each morning too, they don’t fight well and can be extremely tough to release.   I fished Arcadia Beach the third morning and got skunked plus found the beach a bit more difficult due to some nasty rips going on.  This morning I fished only an hour back on Cannon Beach and had a great morning,  I landed 7-8 perch and many were very good sized ones of 1.5 – 2 lbs. and LDR’ed a few more.  All fish came before 6:00 a.m.  I guess the earlier the better since I got all my fish before 6:15 regardless of the actual tide level.  All fish came on a Surfpercher Red in either #2 or #4 with very big dumbbell eyes and a 300 grain head.         Tim