GillBilly YouTube Video: Baja Whale Watching

If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Vincent Van Gogh

GillBilly Video: Just A Couple Of Good Ole Boys

A trout is a moment of beauty known only to those who seek it.
Arnold Gingrich

What a Wonderful Fishing Father... NOT!

Any man would look proud after catching a large barracuda as he poses with the fish and his 14 year-old daughter at the marina afterwards. Then you may wonder why his daughter looks less than thrilled………!!!



14 year old Coral Wira was sitting in a boat while her father fished.



Suddenly she saw a silver flash in the air. The barracuda had thrown the hook and grabbed her arm. Father managed to kill the fish with a knife in the head.



Coral needed 51 stitches! And he felt the need to pose for photos before taking her to hospital!

It is impossible to grow weary of a sport that is never the same on any two days of the year.
Theodore Gordon

Southern California Offshore Fishing Heats Up

Fall ocean fishing is what many anglers live for, the time of year when boats run with less fishermen, the fishing often can be just as good, if not better, than the summer and the conditions usually are pleasant for a calm boat ride.

But this year, fishermen didn’t have much of a choice when it came to choosing to fish in the summer or waiting until the fall. There really wasn’t a summer season of note at the outer banks. Sport boats were fishing bass, rockfish and anything that would bite at a time when the decks would be filled with tuna, dorado and yellowtail.

But that changed last week as offshore fishing turned on. And it continued to build Friday when boats fishing as close as 20 miles off Mission Bay reported good scores on yellowfin tuna.

Capt. Mike Franchak on the Aztec reported in early with 90-plus mixed tuna. The Aztec was on the second day of a two-day run. But closer to home, Capt. Ryan Bostian radioed in 40-plus yellowfin from the morning of a three-quarter-day trip.

At H&M Landing, Capt. Frank Ursitti on the Ranger 85 reported over 60 mixed tuna, with 40 bluefin, 8 yellowfin and 15 albacore.

The Islander at Fisherman’s Landing reported 34 bluefin and a couple of yellowfin tuna on its first drift Friday morning.

The best fisherman I know try not to make the same mistakes over and over again; instead they strive to make new and interesting mistakes and to remember what they learned from them.
John Gierach "Fly Fishing the High Country"

GillBilly Video: Adolph's Bad Day...

In every species of fish I've angled for, it is the ones that have got away that thrill me the most, the ones that keep fresh in my memory. So I say it is good to lose fish. If we didn't, much of the thrill of angling would be gone.
Ray Bergman

GillBilly YouTube Video: How Bad Can the Spill Get?

NOAA has released animation depicting how wide the oil spill may spread if the loop current in the Gulf of Mexico is in a typical configuration. It suggests the oil may spread up the Eastern Coast and well into the North Atlantic.

The trout do not rise in the cemetery, so you better do your fishing while you are still able.
Sparse Grey Hackle

GillBilly Report - The Spill, The Scandal and the President

By Tim Dickinson
This article originally appeared in Rolling Stone 1107 from June 24, 2010.

On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. "They have the technical expertise to plug the hole," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. "It is their responsibility." The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. "If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?" a reporter asked. "No," Gibbs replied.

Now, however, the president was suddenly standing up to take command of the cleanup effort. "In case you were wondering who's responsible," Obama told the nation, "I take responsibility." Sounding chastened, he acknowledged that his administration had failed to adequately reform the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden federal agency that for years had essentially allowed the oil industry to self-regulate. "There wasn't sufficient urgency," the president said. "Absolutely I take responsibility for that." He also admitted that he had been too credulous of the oil giants: "I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." He unveiled a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, discussed the resignation of the head of MMS, and extended a moratorium on new deepwater drilling. "The buck," he reiterated the next day on the sullied Louisiana coastline, "stops with me."

What didn't stop was the gusher. Hours before the president's press conference, an ominous plume of oil six miles wide and 22 miles long was discovered snaking its way toward Mobile Bay from BP's wellhead next to the wreckage of its Deepwater Horizon rig. Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. commander overseeing the cleanup, framed the spill explicitly as an invasion: "The enemy is coming ashore," he said. Louisiana beaches were assaulted by blobs of oil that began to seep beneath the sand; acres of marshland at the "Bird's Foot," where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, were befouled by shit-brown crude – a death sentence for wetlands that serve as the cradle for much of the region's vital marine life. By the time Obama spoke, it was increasingly evident that this was not merely an ecological disaster. It was the most devastating assault on American soil since 9/11.

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

Even after the president's press conference, Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its "best estimate" acknowledged. That same day, the president's Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher's output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group's minimum estimate. The upper range was not included in their report because scientists analyzing the flow were unable to reach a consensus on how bad it could be. "The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."

The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days. "That's what the plume team's numbers show too," Crone says. A source privy to internal discussions at one of the world's top oil companies confirms that the industry privately agrees with such estimates. "The industry definitely believes the higher-end values," the source says. "That's accurate – if not more than that." The reason, he adds, is that BP appears to have unleashed one of the 10 most productive wells in the Gulf. "BP screwed up a really big, big find," the source says. "And if they can't cap this, it's not going to blow itself out anytime soon."

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

The administration's response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had "zero contact" with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

"It is only the inexperienced and thoughtless who find pleasure in killing fish for the mere sake of killing them. No sportsman does this."
W.C. Prime, 1888

GillBilly YouTube Video: San Diego Bay Chili Tsunami Tide Event

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it
can never be fully learnt.
Izaak Walton

Bill Poole the Legend Passes Away

Bill Poole, a legendary captain and leading pioneer of sportfishing in and beyond San Diego, has died after a struggle with lung cancer. He was 87.

Poole died Wednesday, October 21st at his San Diego home with his family by his side, said Betty Stein, his longtime secretary.

Poole, who started with a barge he purchased after World War II, became a boat builder who constructed or had a hand in the construction of many top vessels still operating. They include the Royal Polaris, Royal Star, American Angler and Spirit of Adventure. Many of them are long-range vessels that help make up the world's most sophisticated sportfishing fleet.

Poole's own spirit of adventure drove him to build boats that could be at sea for days and access remote areas off Mexico, where tuna, wahoo and other subtropical species teemed.

His passengers included the rich and famous, but the personable captain admired how fishing treated everyone equally. "It doesn't matter how much money you make, how many cars you drive or how expensive your car is," he once said. "When you step onto a boat to fish, the fish don't give a damn."

Poole also owned or was part-owner of sportfishing landings, marinas and other real estate in San Diego. His wife, Ingrid, said her husband had three passions: "Fishing, hunting and an entrepreneurial challenge."

Poole's hunting exploits were legendary: He once spent 57 days in pursuit of a trophy-size bighorn sheep in Wyoming. "He was a sheep nut and a 10-foot bear nut, and an elephant nut," said Ingrid Poole, who accompanied her husband on many hunting expeditions.

In the sportfishing industry, Poole was known as a throwback character who made loans based on trust and sealed deals with handshakes rather than contracts.

"What you saw is what you got; he was a man of his word," said Bob Fletcher, a friend of Poole's and a former commercial and sportfishing boat captain.

"We lost one of the monster pioneers of sportfishing; nobody else had that kind of impact on our industry," Fletcher said. Paul Morris, general manager of Fisherman's Landing, which was co-owned by Poole and Frank LoPreste, worked with Poole for 42 years.

"He was like a father to me," Morris said. "He was one of those guys who would talk to the employees like they were one of the guys. He treated them like they were part of the group."

In addition to his wife, Poole is survived by their six children: daughters Sandra Schafer, Sherri Thomas and Billie Zambroski; and sons Randy, Eric and Stine.

A memorial service will be held Nov. 25 in San Diego.

You will find angling to be like the virtue of humanity, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of blessing attending upon it.
Izaak Walton