Saturday morning, I found myself out at the Marina del Rey jetty. I wasn’t planning on being there, but it was either that or prefishing Diamond Valley again, which we affectionately now call Cubic Zirconia Valley. I had gotten my ass kicked at DVL on Thursday (5 fish, 6 pounds), and one ass kicking a week is all I could stand, so I decided to visit the salt, where you're always assured to get a bite. Sure, I had other things I could've and should've been doing—things adults do when they’ve lost the zest of being young. But there I was, rods in hand, morning chill brushing off the Pacific, and just like that, I was 13 again.
Funny how one cast, one step out onto the rocks, your first cast getting stuck on said rocks, can pull a whole memory out of the tide.
•
It was 1991. Back when my weekends were spent not adulting, and the world outside your neighborhood might as well have been a different planet that you were itching to explore. Back when a trout rod with six-pound test and a fanny pack filled with tackle was all I had, and still—somehow—it was all I needed.
My friend Robert called me mid week during summer break. We all called him "Monkey" back then, but not in a mean way, but it was just what you did. Everybody had a nickname. He had the long face, the big ole smile, the biggest laugh of all of us. And he had a way of getting you on fish, even when you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.
“You wanna fish the rocks Saturday?” he asked.
“The rocks?”
“King Harbor. Redondo. You been?”
I hadn’t. I’d only heard of King Harbor. Tall tales passed around at the city pond like ghost stories. “Big bonita,” the older fishermen whispered. “Sometimes even yellowtail. Real fish.” Not bluegill. Not bass. Real, fighting fish. Whatever that meant.
I told him I only had my trout rod though.
“You know how to use a baitcaster?”
"Of course!"
Of course, I didn’t know how to use a baitcaster. My experience with a baitcaster was holding one at the tackle shop once, wondering when the day would be that I would be able to graduate to using one; but that really didn't translate to me actually being able to use one.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Good. I’ll bring one for you. Go to Kmart and grab a card of white 1/8 oz crappie jigs. Get a Broken Back Rebel too, in chrome and blue.”
I had no idea what a “Broken Back Rebel” was, but I found and bought one anyway. My dad picked it up, looked it over, and laughed:
“Da hell you gonna catch on that? A tuna? You gotta be a real pendejo to not hook a fish with all them hooks on that thing.!”
We didn’t get to the jetty until 10 a.m. That was already a break from our normal routine when we bass fished, when we'd be on the road before dawn. But the ocean didn’t care about clocks. It had its own apparently.
Robert handed me an old 7'6" Fenwick HMX "Flipping" rod with an even older Ambassador that looked like it had fought in a war.
“Just don’t mess it up,” he grinned.
We climbed across the jetty like kids who hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of falling. Some rocks were slick, jagged, some were huge, others would wobble when you'd step on them. Crabs scattered ahead of us like if we were giants.
Robert set up his rig—some 10-foot custom rod built on a Shikari blank. Exquisite wrapping, high end guides. He worked in thread and Gudebrod epoxy like Picasso worked in oils. He threaded a big water bubble. Swivel. Eight feet of stout Ande, 14# test. A hand-tied white feather hook that looked more like a kindergarten art project that they made their mom was tied on the end. I wondered how he would cast that thing, and then came the pendulum-cast, feather whizzing past his ear as he launched that thing halfway across the harbor, towards the plume of hot water from the Edison plant. That hot water plume was the reason this insane fishery existed in the first place.
"The Bubble," circa 1996, Courtesy of www.pierfishing.com
He retrieved this rig in violent jerks, winding up the slack, the bubble leaving a foam line in its wake. A few jerks later, I heard a BAM 8 feet behind his bobber. The water exploded. His Daiwa SS2500's spool began spinning backwards spraying a fine salty mist all over. Robert never even flinched. In fact, he yelled some advice to me, and I could barely hear him thanks to his drag.
“Jerk that crappie jig back to you!” he shouted, mid-fight. “As fast as you can!”
So I did. I cast out with my 7 foot trout rod, and the white crappie jig landed with a gentle entry, unlike the bombardment of Robert's clear water bubble. And on the third jerk, it felt I'd hooked a car that was speeding in the opposite direction. My rod doubled over and the brand-new Stradic 1000 that I’d bought with birthday money a few weeks earlier, started screaming. I had never heard that sound before. I couldn't even get a wind in.
Naturally, I cranked the drag down.
POP.
Gone.
It didn’t matter. I was shaking. Laughing. Hooked in every way a kid could be.
Eventually I gave up on my ultralight gear after the 2nd fish I hooked broke the spring inside my spool and my drag sounded like a car riding on its rims down the 405. I finally had to bite the bullet and pick up Robert’s old baitcaster and I carefully tied on that chrome and blue Rebel. My first cast with it went 25 feet before my thumb betrayed me and the reel exploded in a beautiful nest of tangled monofilament.
“So you learn, cabrón!” Robert laughed.
It was easy for him to laugh. He was jumping to and from rocks, rod bent over as he continued to fight his fish, meanwhile, my reel looked like it had thrown up spaghetti.
“Just pull all the loops out. You’ll get it.”
Five minutes later, I was still pulling loops, feeling like Sisyphus pushing a boulder uphill, when KERSPLASH. I turned to look where that noise had come from, and my line got tight.
“YOU’RE ON!”
Somehow, that Rebel had drifted and gotten lost near the bubble, and a giant bonita had found it. The fish screamed off with what little line I had pulled out, yanking the backlash straight out of the reel as the fish flew toward Catalina. It fought like it hated me. I fought back with trembling arms and sore hands. This had been the hardest fighting fish I had ever hooked.
And I won.
A 7-pound bonito flopped on the rocks. I was shaking. Grinning. Covered in salt and sea spray and 13-year-old pride. We caught a few more that day. Came back again and again that summer. Until it ended. Until the bubble went cold. Until I stopped being a kid.
(The bubble did burst when Edison shut down the hot water outflow a few years later, and once the warm water stopped, so did the bite. The jetties eventually closed too, for safety reasons. And Robert? He passed a few years back. We’d lost touch long before that. Life just… moved on, the way it always does.)
•
Back in MDR, my brain was jolted back to 2025, as my rod was nearly ripped outta my hands. I hadn't caught a spotted bay bass in a while, and I forgot how tenacious these guys were.
I went on to catch a few more, and headed back home, content.
We all have a first jetty. Mine was King Harbor. And the fish weren’t the only thing I caught out there. Somewhere between those rocks and that chrome Broken Back Rebel, I grew up a little. But, we can always be kids again, although I'm a little bit more careful when I traverse those rocks these days.
