Last week, Kohei invited Chris and I to go fishing off of the coast of Avila for 3 days. The conditions are very different from Southern California, as the winds and waves make anything other than fishing in the morning prohibitive.
The place is an ecological gem off the coast of California, and the fishing is unrivaled in terms of size and number of rockfish that you can catch. A professor at UCSB told me of the phenomenal fishing to be found here when I was an undergrad, and I finally got to check it out for myself.
The first day, we used nothing other than Sabiki rigs, and used the smaller fish that we caught for bait with quick results. We released all of the other fish that we caught that day.
The second day, we caught 2 ling cod and over 30 rock fish between the three of us, off the coast of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. You aren’t allowed to get within a mile of the facility, so with this in mind we fished its perimeter with great results. The lingcod and many of our larger rockfish were caught by yo-yo’ing blue and white candybar jigs off of the rocky bottom. The rest of the rockfish, and a Cabazon, were caught by using bait that was, itself, caught off of Sabiki rigs.

This is the first Ling Cod we got. It was too small, so we tossed it back.
Ling Cods look like giant mutsugoro, but taste much better!

This is Kohei’s Ling, which required the use of a gaff to land. It was not so lucky as the first one, and made for a delicious dinner along with the other rockfish that we kept. It had a nasty chomp mark on its flank, likely left by a bigger one. This is one fish whose mouth you don’t want to stick your fingers in.

This is Chris’ ferocious trout from Lake Lopez, on a trip we took the following day. Sweet!

Kohei filleted these suckers in record time, and attracted a medium size crowd in the process. The de-filleted carcasses were quickly snatched up by rival flocks of gulls and pelicans, as well as a sea lion. They started out noisy as all heck, and by the end they were silent, each animal content with their abundance of good fortune. We ended up with well over 20 pounds of fillets!

A view down the mouths of the Ling and a Rock Cod. The rock cods seemed to be eating a lot of juvenile decorator crabs, judging from the stuff that they regurgitated onto the deck.

I also took a road trip with my sister and her boyfriend from North Chicago to Orange County in a QX4, loaded full of her stuff. More photos and stories will follow. Never before have I had such a ton of content on the backlog that needs posting. I hope that the pile keeps on growing. Is there such a thing as too much fun and finding the things around you too interesting?

This dude, along with others of his kind, resides at the Marine Center in the southeast of Oita prefecture. This was one of the many places that my dad and I visited on our hectic tour of Kyushu, which I will post more on in the near future.

After a lengthy period of consideration, I’ve decided to keep posting under the same blog name. Some changes to the site design will have to be made, and I have a ton of content to post.
Justin- nice job on the site overhaul. I don’t miss the time consuming process of separating spam from real comments and trackback and using MT Blacklist in tandem with Movable Type several times a day. That was getting tedious.

Perched behind a cliff, I thought I was in a good position to get some good shots of waves pounding against the rocks. I was right, but a huge “sleeper wave” sucked the receeding water back, swelled up, and smashed into the cliff, flowing along the contour right at my camera!
My new shoes and pants got soaked, but thankfully my camera was not damaged. I walked away dripping and sandy with a smile on my face, quite aware of just how lucky I was.
I don’t think I’ll be trying that again anytime soon…

Here are two good articles that you should read:
This one talks about the largest attempted bank heist (in a Sumitomo Mitsui in London) and shady dealings in the growing economies of online games like World of Warcraft, putting everything into context with classic trickery used through out history.
The other one deals with RFID chips, and vulnerabilities inherent in their indiscriminant use. I have to say, I was a little suspicious about my parents’ new keyless Prius (it uses a RFID chip in leiu of a mechanical key) and those suspicions have only grown after reading the article.

Wired has a pretty good gallery of Akibahara up here. Taro hit it spot on when he said that Akibake like to hang out at Yodobashi Camera (the one in the picture looks identical to the one in Umeda).

Everyone who goes through Incheon Airport probably has shot these signs already, but…

I asked the vendor “Does this ice cream taste good?”. When he said “Yes, try some!”, I politely declined. If the ice cream wasn’t being sold at airport prices, I might have taken him up on it.

Cool. Maybe I’ll try it next time.

You can view the set here.