Private fin farm

Big Sur, Calif. â€”  About the only thing I find more stunning than the beauty of the Big Sur coastline is the size and number of fish that dwell in the waters here. And the reason for this, you might ask? Isolation can breed many -- and big -- fish.

The bonanza comes down to fishing pressure, or rather the absence of it. It’s not easy to get to this windfall. The coastline here is rocky. Inaccessible areas dominate long stretches. Take a small boat with an outboard or a Zodiac, and sites for getting it into the water are extremely limited. And you may as well leave the powerboat at home -- there aren’t any boat ramps. The nearest ports are hours away by water from the middle of the Big Sur coast. Charter a boat if you want in Monterey, but it’ll cost you, and you’ll spend a big chunk of the day motoring to and from the fishing spots here.

My solution was to take the advice of locals and turn to a fishing kayak. Now all I had to do was find a way to get it into the ocean. I heard lots of stories about kayak launch sites, each one seemingly more daunting than the next. One spot required lowering a boat down a rock face with ropes. There were harrowing tales of creeping with kayaks on backs along vertigo-inducing goat trails for hundreds of feet and of launching from and returning to rocky shores ready to deliver a concussion.

But the “tunnel,� as it is called by a clutch of kayak fishers in this area, is only for the seriously dedicated. It lies in the corner of a tight bend in Highway 1, a few miles south of the tiny town of Gorda. After parking alongside the highway, I proceeded to make my own trail to the east across boulders and down a steep incline to a creek. Here my guide, Brendan Craven from Santa Cruz, explained to me you climb into the culvert with your kayak and, either paddling or pulling the boat, make your way maybe 200 feet to the ocean side where the creek spills onto a rock ledge.

When I was a kid, my brothers and I used to make sport of climbing through the storm sewers in my hometown. It still gives me bad dreams. Perhaps that was one reason the place gave me the creeps. But the scary stuff, as Craven told me, is at the other end of the tunnel, at the ocean’s edge. Last year, he launched from this ledge successfully but waves slammed him into the rocks upon his return. Luckily he wasn’t seriously injured.

I decided not to tempt shipwreck. The soft, sandy beach at Limekiln State Park, about 60 miles south of Carmel, was much more to my liking. Still, it wasn’t easy. After toting my kayak a good 300 yards, I then had to fight through the surf. Heading out through the breakers, I was soaked by a big wave. (Later, when I was coming in, a wave dumped me into the surf and turned my kayak into an unguided missile, flinging the thing nearly to Nevada.)

I finally managed to get into deep water. And then I found that all the hassles, claustrophobia and acrophobia episodes can be worth it. For these waters can give up some fish -- halibut, salmon, lingcod, white sea bass and thresher shark. On a clear, sun-drenched day the kelp beds a mile or so off Limekiln beach yielded not only many, but large rockfish (in season on this outing). Vermilions, olives and shallow-water rockfish rarely allowed my jigs -- 6-inch scampi, fish traps, diamond jigs and crocodile spoons -- to hit the bottom. In fact, they often boiled and jumped out of the water to chase the bait.

It is easy to cast while kayak fishing, nearly as easy as standing on the deck of a powerboat. On this day, though, all I had to do was drop the jigs overboard, and I would get a bite before they hit the bottom.

The kayak makes it all possible. You can get up into a thick tangle of kelp or closer in to rocks, places a boat with a prop wouldn’t dare go.

You also get the kind of open-air vantage that makes sure nothing gets by you. The big hills and rocks of Big Sur roll down toward the Pacific as though they are itching to crawl toward Asia. It is as if they are poised for some signal to take on the ocean. As I was out on the big water that day, below the towering cliffs, in a pristine nook of a pristine coastline, with nothing but the fretting of a sea gull to jar the silence, I could swear I saw the rocks move.

So it was later, once I had gathered myself from being pitched into the surf at Limekiln, that I realized the truth of fishing Big Sur. I would have had a thoroughly enjoyable time without catching a single fish.