SoCal Angler
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Echo Park, to be exact.
Walking distance to the lake—pond, if you want to be honest about it.
It didn’t become part of my life until I was about eleven. That’s where it started. Not because I chose it—but because I got kicked out of the house.
It was the summer of ’89. Our travel ball team got bounced in the first round, and instead of a deep playoff run playing baseball, I spent the first few weeks sitting around eating Fruit Loops instead.
At a family party, flipping through my uncle’s old Outdoor Life magazines, my mom decided she’d had enough.
“Get him out of the house. Para que no sea huevón.”
Translation: this kid is becoming useless.
A few days later, I was up before sunrise, half asleep in the passenger seat of my cousin’s truck, heading toward the water.
It was 6 a.m. in the middle of summer vacation, which made no sense at the time. About 30 minutes later—back when everything in LA was somehow still 30 minutes away—we were standing at the end of Belmont Pier.
He handed me $1.75 in quarters and told me to buy a bag of frozen anchovies.
And then we went to work.
Absolute carnage. Mackerel flying over the rails like they had a death wish. Cast, hook up, repeat. No finesse. No thinking. Just chaos and bent rods.
Somewhere in that chaos, I learned how to cast, tie knots, and rig up. No YouTube. No tutorials. Just hands-on learning.
Mackerel are dumb.
Real f*cking dumb.
When we got back, I smelled like the fish section at 99 Ranch Market. As I was leaving, my cousin stopped me.
“Hey—you’re forgetting something.”
He handed me the rod, reel, and tackle box we’d been using all day. A 7-foot Berkley Power Pole with that fluorescent green tip, paired with a JDM Ryobi spinning reel built like a tank.
I can probably blame him for the JDM addiction.
Just like that—I had my own setup. No ceremony. No speech. Just: here, this is yours now.
Next morning—lights on, no mercy. My mom standing there with the rod like a drill sergeant.
No words needed.
She made me a bologna sandwich with government cheese and sent me out the door. A regular Tom Sawyer in the hood.
Echo Park immediately took my lunch money.
Turns out bass and bluegill don’t care much for frozen anchovies on baitholders with a half ounce pyramid sinker. I dragged that setup around the lake like an idiot and went home empty.
Second lesson in fishing.
Freshwater fish aren’t that dumb.
I hit the library that week. Did some homework. Came back a few days later.
Redemption.
A bucket full of bluegill—my Vietnamese neighbor took care of those that night.
But something else had my attention.
There were bigger fish in that water.
Longer. Meaner. More aggressive. Big mouths. And they wanted nothing to do with me.
They moved different—cutting through the schools of bluegill like bullies on the playground. I couldn’t get them to touch mealworms, but one day I dug up a worm from under a trash can and finally got one to commit.
It pulled.
It jumped.
It fought.
And just like that, 100 mackerel didn’t mean anything anymore.
That was it.
From that point on, I was chasing bass.
“They seem smarter,” I told myself.
If you spend enough time at a city pond, you start to meet the characters. Every pond’s got its crew. The guys who know. The guys who act like they know. The guys who definitely don’t know shit.
And eventually, you find the bass guys.
They had it—the confidence, the swagger, the gear I couldn’t afford, the results. And somehow, they let me hang around.
Nobody tells you how to fish these places.
You figure it out, or you don’t.
We fished everything—local ponds, Redondo jetties, rented skiffs in the harbors. When we could, we hit bigger water: Castaic, Piru, Pyramid, Perris.
Getting on a boat felt like leveling up.
That’s where most of it was learned.
And earned.
I stepped away from it for a while during college. Life has a way of doing that.
When I came back, fishing had changed.
Internet. Overseas tackle. Senkos. Drop shots. Everything had a name now.
The only thing that didn’t change was the fish.
Not long after, I linked up with more guys from the urban scene. It’s a small world—two degrees of separation at most.
I met Albert. We fished hard. Weekend after weekend at DVL, renting boats like it was going out of style. They knew us by name. Knew the outboard we liked.
Weekends blurred together. To switch things up, we’d fish the shore at a private lake and come home with 100+ fish days. And it finally happened. I got burned out from bass fishing.
Somewhere in there, I picked up float tubing.
And eventually, fly fishing.
The Sierras opened up a different world—quiet water, wild fish, places that didn’t feel like LA at all.
The kind of places that make you forget where you came from.
I still pick up the fly rod when I can.
But bass… bass always wins.
These days, I’m still chasing them.
Tournaments when it makes sense. Harbors when they’re right. City water when nothing else is.
Same grind. Different day.
100+ days a year, easy.
Not bad for a kid from Echo Park.