A rainbow trout from County Wicklow, Ireland–where Mom’s ancestors, Famine people, came from–and the display at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Elizabeth always has to grab me firmly by the arm and lead me away from the trout display. I want to jump in after them.
I just wrote about Ken Kobara remembering that Executive Order 9066 being carried out the day before trout season opened in 1942.
Let me tell you about trout season opening day. If you’re from Arroyo Grande, it came in third place, but only after Christmas and Thanksgiving.
One of my happiest memories is fishing from a plank bridge over the creek–it would’ve been washed away in 1969–halfway between the Cecchetti Road crossing and the Harris Bridge, where we lived. My Dad was next to me; I was little and he was big and we dropped our lines into the creek below and we just sat there, quiet. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that safe.
When I was a little bigger, Dad would give me five bucks–an enormous sum in 1964–and turn me loose in Kirk’s Spirits and Sports on Branch Street (today it’s the Villa Cantina).
–Hooks? Check.
–Leader? Check.
–Line? Check.
–Floats? Check.
–Weights? Check.
–Shiny lures? Check.
–Salmon eggs? Check.
–Night crawlers? Check.
Once we were appropriately armed, my best good buddy Richard Ayres and I would sleep in a walnut orchard overnight that was maybe 200 feet away from our favorite fishing spot, a little narrows in Arroyo Grande Creek with a sweet little still spot.
Mind you, our house was RIGHT NEXT TO Arroyo Grande Creek and not far from the spot where I once hooked a steelhead who almost gave me an eleven-year-old heart attack. Man, she was angry. Broke my line.
Richard was a good fisherman. I was spectacularly inept, in part owing to my ADHD difficulty in remotely understanding knots.
Knots had nothing to do with the beaver pond just off Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields in the Upper Valley. I was fishing there by myself one day–the beavers were rather indignant, and they really DO slap their tails on the water’s surface–when a shaft of sunlight suddenly made the pond transparent.
There, just below the surface, was a veritable Armada of rainbow trout.
I was so excited that I fell in. My night crawlers died futile deaths.
The trout scattered.
The beavers, I am reasonably sure, were laughing at me.
And I don’t blame them.
A Work in Progress 
I remember a beaver pond, when I was about seven, in the creek about where Strother park is now. I remember there being sweet corn on the other side of the creek.It was walnut and apple trees. We would wade/swim in the pond, play with our wind-up float plane and hunt lizards. About 1962/63 when we lived on Pearwood
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Wonderful, wonderful memories. We were pretty lucky, I think!
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When we moved down here from the Bay Area in ‘57ish, we stayed in the green house in the walnut orchard just above the present mayor’s home. I don’t think we there even a year before my folks bought a new home in Fair Oaks. But being in the orchard was wonderful. Few neighbors and lots of room for a 10 year old to roam. Down in the creek, besides oodles of poison oak which was a miserable learning experience, there was a gauge. I guess someone would or could measure the flow of water in the creek there, but I never saw anyone there. I used to go fishing there regularly and learned that about the only time I caught a fish there at the gauge was directly after a significant rain storm. New fish would wash down into that hole every storm. Sadly, I never ran across any steelhead there! Just missed the good old steelhead days. Good memories!
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Was your Dad a scoutmaster? If so, he was one of the kindest me I’ve ever met.
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Scoutmaster? Yes he was. I think it was troop 26? I think Norm Jensen got him into it. They both work at the Unocal refinery on the mesa. My dad was the scoutmaster during the early ‘60’s and was sponsored by St Patrick’s Catholic Church.
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Our family moved to Arroyo Grande in 1968. I was almost 13 years old when we moved into the the old Loomis house on top of Crown Hill. Early on I wondered down to “the gauge” with my fishing pole, not knowing that would begin a lifelong love affair with the Arroyo Grande creek. That evening I only got one bite but at that moment I was in heaven.
I grew up in Bakersfield & rarely had the oppotunity to fish & when I did, it seemed I never had the right pole, reel, bate or gear. So, when I got that one bite, I knew where I’d be spending my mornings, my evenings, my summers & most of my free time. I remember days in the coldest winters, going down before school & coming home with frozen fingers.
One cold, December evening that first year, I went down to the gauge to check the water level. Because it was nearly dark I did not bring my pole. The steelhead were leaping by the 100’s, something that I had only seen on TV. It was a 10 minute walk up the house & I knew by the time I got back it would be dark. I was hardly able to sleep & rose at 5 am to go collect my score. When I arrived at first light they were poof, gone, already moving up to their spawning area. The older I get, the more that evening seems as only a dream & I have to remind myself that it really happened. as I never had that experience again.
Over the years I fished every square foot from the dam to Oceano catching thousands of trout from little 6 inchers to 5 pound behemoths. Only when they put a moritorium on the creek (in the 1990’s I think), did I begrudingly stop fishing the creek.
To this day, I know I could go down there & catch as many trout as I ‘d like & imagine there are some monsters throughout. Maybe they will one day allow fishing again but if they don’t I am still left with many years of great memories.
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Thank you for such a wonderful story!
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