Dave Peter shares his love of fishing. Recorded at Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens.
Transcript
Hello, I'm Dave Peter. I'm a local San Clemente resident and I love to fish. I've been fishing ever since I was a little kid and some of the stories - when I was a little kid I would sneak on different boats. But this one particular time, my father had been invited on a charter and he couldn't go so he sent me. I was about thirteen - it might have been twelve or thirteen, but I was about six three so I was taller than most guys anyway.
And [I] went down to San Diego and it was the yellow tail derby. We were trolling and I was up - my turn to troll, everybody would rotate. Four rods went off and mine broke off and another guy's broke off, But, when the guys got the two in, they were about six foot long bigeye tuna. They weighed a little over 155 pounds.
So all the guys are telling me, "Hey, you know, the biggest fish hits first." Well, mine got bit first and got broke off, so I'm like devastated that I lost my big fish, "It would've been mine."
I was fishing all day with everybody and it was a really slow day. We didn't really catch anything else but I hooked up a few blue sharks, eight and nine foot long. Had a fun day doing that.
Then at the end of the trip when we got done, a guy came up to me - an older guy - and he said, "I've got to apologize to you."
I said, "What for? You didn't do anything to me."
He said, "Well, I was thinking when you came on board, you brought the kit." That isn't quite how he put it, but he says, "Man, you fish better than most of the guys on the boat and then you kept all the sharks busy all day too, so they didn't bug us." He said, "You know, you can go fishing with us any time you want."
And that's kind of how I've been. I've gone on charters - I've had one particular boat that I've been on for almost... since 1972. We'll either charter it or we'll take the kids out and the kids can charter it. So that's '82, '92, 2002, almost forty years in the same boat through three different owners and skippers and it's just a lot of fun to be out on the water and to see the whales and the dolphins and get into a wide open bite with fish foaming everywhere and anything that hits the water gets bit or you just hang a jig in the water and you watch waves of yellow fin come by and you pick the one you want to catch then you drop it in.
There's just an excitement that - if you get bit by a bug - well that's the one that bit me. So, go out and fish!
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This item may be used for non-commercial and educational purposes.
The opinions expressed in OC Stories do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of OC Public Libraries or its partners and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Images are courtesy of story tellers and affiliate organizations or used in accordance with fair use and Creative Commons.
Music and sound in accordance with fair use and Creative Commons [ http://creativecommons.org ].