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[pinboy3niner]

41. I spent a lot of time fishing there a long time ago

That was long before the storm knocked out the pier and it was rebuilt.

We'd fish for Halibut but kept hooking up Bonito, which was a nightmare because as soon as they got hooked they'd race back and forth, tangling everyone's lines.

When I finally got a Halibut, I was in heaven. It wasn't very big--just 13 pounds--but I was the hero of the pier. I had company for dinner that night, so I cleaned the fish and grabbed a simple recipe out of a cookbook for broiling it with onion, covered in breadcrumbs and dotted with butter. And I was the hero of my dinner party, because the Halibut came out magnifique.

Those days are long gone. At Santa Monica Pier a while back I talked to the bait shop owner, who said none of the piers get Halibut like they used to. And there are warnings about not eating fish caught close-in to the piers.

But I have good memories of fishing Redondo Pier. And they had a walk-up window at the beginning of the pier where you could get some halfway decent hot clam chowder on those cold days. Even though their coffee sucked.