Fishing the pipeline
If you’ve kayak fished Dana Point very much, you’ve probably heard people talking about “the pipe”. There’s a secondary waste water treatment plant in the San Juan Creek bed just upstream from Doheny State Beach. The treated waste water is pumped off shore through a 10,550 foot pipe under Doheny State Beach. The pipe runs in a SSW direction out to about a 100 foot depth and then the diffuser runs another 1272 feet in a NW direction. The majority of this pipe is buried in the seabed with a nice covering of boulders.
This long pile of rocks along with the kelp growing on it makes for a wonderful fish habitat. Here you’ll find calico and sand bass, sculpin, rock fish, White Sea bass, and all the other fish that inhabit our local waters. You might even find a nice halibut lurking on the edges of the boulders or a toothy ling cod at the deep limits.
I like to fish the pipe with live bait on a dropper loop using a torpedo weight. I’m always rigged with spectra for the main line and a short length of fluorocarbon as a leader and will vary the size of the weight depending on the size of the bait and the amount of current and wind drift, but usually between 2 and 4 ounces. I’ll also vary the rating on the fluorocarbon and because it’s easy to get hung up on the bottom, will usually use 30 pound test.
Unless you know where the pipe is, it can be very difficult to find and without a fish finder you won’t be able to stay over it. In some places the rock pile may only rise a couple feet off the bottom and in others it may rise 12 feet. Because of the amount of current and wind drift that can occur here, I always have a drift chute stowed on my kayak. Here’s a screen shot of how the pipe will appear on your fish finder.
So, to get you started, here are a couple of my favorite spots along the pipe to catch fish. The first one is in about 45 feet and the second around 65 foot depth.
N33.26.881 – W117.41.368
N33.26.354 – W117.41.580
With these two spots on your chart plotter, you’ll get a good indication of the direction the pipe runs and can add your own spots along this line. Crisscross the pipe in an east-west direction and add another mark each time you see a significant change in the depth. Pretty soon you’ll have a nice line of marks denoting where the pipe and the fish exist, like this: