part 2
A Fishing Trip wiTh a night that couldn’t end Suisun!
Dee ThomAs
T
he walk was a short one. as we slogged through the rain and wet we reached our trusty boat waiting for us like a faithful friend. i fired up the engine, it roared to life with just a touch of the key. dee let go the bow rope and we were off. in order to get to Suisun you need to navigate a small body of water called the Carquinez Straits. it’s more like a river than a bay, but it’s part of the bay system. There is a bridge. Hell, there are all kinds of bridges over the bays around there, but this one was called the Benicia Bridge. once you crossed under the Benicia Bridge you were in Suisun Bay, i asked dee where he wanted to anchor up he told me about a half mile from the bridge. i proceeded to travel the half mile and he said, “okay, start to shut her down”. i slowed the engine and he lined us up where he wanted to be by points. We didn’t have any GPS in those days, so we would line up by three points. These particular points were a big windmill, a big old pylon on the shore and the North tower of the bridge. When we got it just right we dropped the hook.
By ray DIaz
Story
Photos courtesy of Dee Thomas
continue with Ray Diaz on his look back at a fishing trip with Dee Thomas
on a normal day, you need about three times the rode to depth of water. That means if you are anchored in 20-ft of water you would need 60-ft of rode. That’s normal; but, and here is the fly in the ointment, if you have a three foot wave on top of that 20-ft you would need 69-ft of rode - so on and so forth. on this particular day we had about a 3-ft wave to deal with and 40-ft of water. We needed 129-ft of rode just to be able to fish where we wanted. Now, you add the wind you should drop out another 20-ft just to be on the safe side. That’s a whopping 149-ft of rode and chain. Have you ever tried to bring in 149- ft of rode and chain and anchor on a bad day? take it from me, it is not an easy thing to do. on my boat i carried 300-ft of rode. i never thought i would use it ,but better safe than sorry at any rate i had the extra length just in case things got snotty ...oh, they got snotty. We set the anchor and set up our rods. once the rods were baited and set to soaking there is not a lot to do, you watch the rod tip, and then when it moves,
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