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Last time I went to the little concrete tackle shop at the pier in Pacifica and looked at the faded polaroids taped to the window, there was still one of me from 1994 holding a 41lb striped bass I hauled in off the end, the largest ever taken there.
Almost got it stolen from me at the last minute. The pier is tall, 20ft or 30ft above the water, so once you've brought the fish to the surface you have to get a guy to position a crab net just underwater so you can guide the fish over net and get it hauled up. There were hundreds of people on the pier that day watching me... no one else had a fish on.. and just as I managed to get that 40lb bass in positioned over the net, I'll be damned if a sea lion burst out of the water, slap the shit out of my fish, and try to eat it off of my hook. It slapped the fish away from the 'net and stunned for me. This time the sea lion stayed on the surface as it turned to make its second attempt at eating the fish, so I've got one eye on it, and the other on 40lbs of wriggling bass I'm trying to get into a small net 30 feet below.
I ended up filleting the fish on the pier and splitting it with the dude who handled the crab net, because he yanked it out of the water probably 1/10th of a second before the seal lion would have grabbed my fish.
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