RV Spawning Grounds

For Judy and I, RV camping season is all year round.  In the summer it’s the Cascades and fishing.  In the winter it’s snow camping where we try to cross country ski.  But there are those times when the fishing is not good or the snow is not quite right and we are looking to get out of the Oregon rain.  One place we like to go is south on highways 101 and 1 to San Francisco.  We have done this several times as our youngest son Marty is in the Navy and was stationed at Monterey, CA for a couple of tours.  On the way south we would stop at a wide spot on Highway 101 near Stone Lagoon State Park.  This was one of the few places you could camp for free on the beach.  Eventually the State of California decided we were having too much fun and made it day use only.  But before that stupid decision, there were so many RV’s camped end to end that used this area to boondock that we began to call it the RV spawning grounds.  It was such a unique spot that we even used it for one of our group campouts with family and friends. On that particular campout, Marty and his wife Nikki drove up from Monterey to join us putting their tent on the sand just outside our RV’s door

During that campout, the surf perch and smelt were running.  This was an amazing and fun fishing time, well worth the cost of an out-of-state license.  A short trip to Oric, CA and we had our licenses and also got the skinny on how to catch surf perch from the lady owner of the local hardware store.  What she recommended was a perch jig which is a three foot section of leader rigged with two hooks and a pyramid weight at the end.  You bait the hooks with sand shrimp, clams or mole crabs, the latter of  which you can catch for yourself right on the beach.  These cute little guys live in the surf zone making their living by filtering sea water with specialized legs that look a little-frilly first baseman’s mitts, feeding in much the same way that barnacles do.  Unlike barnacles that are attached to rocks, mole crabs are fast little swimmers which follow the tides up and down the beach where they bury themselves tail first in the shifting sand.  They frequently get washed out by the breaking waves, after which they back stroke like crazy then dig like hell back into the sand as the wave ebbs back.  They manage to do this in an eye blink so their amazing antics are usually overlooked by the casual tourist playing tag with the same wave.  They had better be quick as a slow digger is an easy meal for a gull.  They had better be good swimmers as getting washed into deeper water means death by perch.  But as long as they stay on this precarious ledge between winged and finned death they seem to do pretty well for themselves.  As their numbers are near infinite, a minute or two of digging with my folding camp shovel in the wet sand above the surf and I was ready to fish.  

Now I am not much of a surf fisherman.  I don’t have the 9 foot long surf pole nor the waders to stay out in the splash zone and get washed away to sea never to be seen again.   What I do is wait till a wave breaks then run as fast as I can after it down the steep beach slope till I lose my courage at which time I cast my line hard over the next wave, then turn and run up the slope with my line free wheeling off the reel.  If I make it back out of the surf zone alive, I then take up the slack and try to hold the pole high up over my head so that the taut line clears the breaking waves.  If the surf is not too high and the pyramid weight is heavy enough, the weight will work its way into the sand behind the breaking waves and anchor.  When it works it is a beautiful thing.  When it does not, the line gets flattened by incoming waves, I don’t catch fish and get very wet.  

On that particular campout, conditions were perfect with my line just clearing the waves.  As each of these waves broke batches of silver smelt erupted into the air above the wave crest and fell haphazardly onto the back of the wave as it passed.  In the trough behind the breaking waves were harbor seals torpedoing parallel to the beach face, only having to keep their mouths open to fill their bellies.  It did not take long before I had my first perch, sometimes hooking two at a time.  Marty was fishing next to me having just as much fun.  Somehow he got the pole into Nikki’s hands, who being a city girl had not yet mastered the run-cast-run technique.  She soon hooked one and managed to reel it in.  Then, much to everyone’s delight, walked up and down the beach dragging the fish in the sand behind her trying to get someone to take it off the hook, which no one did as it was just too damn cute.

The spawning grounds did not have much in the way of campground amenities being essentially a wide spot on highway 101.  What it did have were portable vault toilets which Judy would use being as there were no pits underneath them.  Still I had to assure her that there were no beach snakes.  While there might be water snakes on the other side of the highway next to a small freshwater lake, the only way one was going to get into the outhouse was to slither out of the grass next to the lake, crawl across a busy highway, then after managing to trip the latch with its forked tongue to get inside it would have to intentionally crawl into a plastic vat of toxic blue chemicals.  Only a Trump voter could be that stupid.  

“Check it anyway” she ordered.  

So I, being the loving and obedient husband that I am, said “yes dear” as all husbands do who think the women ride the short bus when it comes to logical thinking.  That is why you almost never see a woman rise to a high office to become a “war president”, as they are generally incapable of understanding that sometimes it is necessary to kill innocent women and kids because some despotic leader wants the oil for himself rather than letting you have it to fuel your RV.  

The spawning grounds also had dumpsters.  I found this campground feature particularly useful as I had forgotten to toss shit from the previous summers camping trips which had been fermenting in the RV’s cubbies for a few months.  One of the items was our Wal-Mart BBQ, which had been sitting since the previous August hidden under a soggy Astroturf rug.  This might have been OK but I had also forgotten to clean it when I “stored” it.  The whole inside was fuzzy with green and white mold which is also, by the way, the unofficial flower of the State of Oregon.  Into the dumpster it went along with a plastic bag of cans which I had intended to recycle but was now afraid to open, a partial bag of damp cat litter, and a stack of last years Weekly World News minus the pictures of the page five girls.  I know I am pathetic but I just can’t resist headlines like “ET Endorses Bush for President” And what insidious bastards the ETs turned out to be, destroying this great nation of ours without ever having to invade. 

Into the dumpster the BBQ goes.  A few hours later as I am tossing the remains of our breakfast into the same dumpster, I am astonished to notice that the BBQ was gone.  While there is no doubt in my mind that given the amount of mold inside it that it might have been capable of some rudimentary form of locomotion, I sincerely doubt it could have managed to crawl out.  Somebody had dumpster dived and taken it!  Even the white trash of Waldport (my home town) would not have done this.  However, that evening when I returned with the dinner leavings, it was back pretty much in the same spot in the dumpster, which partially restored my faith in the intelligence of the RV community.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny.  Judy and I were up early digging at low tide for our supply of mole crabs to be used on the incoming tide to catch even more surf perch.  Judy looked up from her chore just as this large and frightening looking dog tongued her in the face.  Obviously the dog’s looks did not match its personality.  The woman with the dog immediately began to apologize.  As Judy raised her eyes to say it was all right, she found herself staring at the woman’s crotch which was inadequately covered by a leopard spot thong clearly visible and framed through a pair of see-through purple exercise shorts.  Judy quickly moved her eyes off the offending thong and up the woman’s body to find that she was now staring at what once might have been the biological versions of the Grand Tetons but had over geologic time eroded into gelatinous mounds which were barely concealed in a low cut swimsuit covered up by a see-through top.  Choking back a gasp Judy turned her face away and caught me still staring in awe.  Although this lady was well past her prime I, like most normal men are suckers for Sluts-R-Us outfits, and, being past 50, well past 50, my standards as to what fills out the outfit have slipped a bit.  Although inappropriately attired we had a pleasant conversation with her, finding out that she had just gotten the dog, a black and white purebred WTF and that she was a little worried about it as the breed has a fierce reputation.  I guess the lick sort of settled that question for her.  But all in all we had a nice conversation with her and the most recent guy she was shacking up with who was hanging on her like the stains on Monica’s blue dress.  It was going to be another  great day at the spawning grounds.