Went to Dundee today and covered a lot of water chasing those beaked adrenalin injections, it started a bit slow with one sail of maybe 12kg coming to the deckie in the morning, that’s OK though because there is now one less Billie Virgin in the world and one more case of beaked fever.
The sail was raised around the Bowra wide grounds listed by me previously, we then spent a few hours down at Sail City, no joy there either, huge open water bait schools of jelly bean tuna and herring with no predators carving them up?!?
Things were looking grim with no sails to been seen on the best bait balls you've ever seen ...Anyway the call was made to head back to the area we picked up the Sail and have one last troll... Well low and behold 200m into the run and we spot a black sunning itself on the surface 30-40m off the starboard side, as we pull level I figure I've got nothing to lose so I pitch a bait on the spin gear, the bait hits the water about 5m in front of the fish and he spots it almost instantly and charges the bait, before pulling up short as I slow the skip, he turns broadside to us and I get a good look at him and it's at this point that I'm questioning the wisdom of pitching a gar on 8kg spin gear at a fish that's MUCH bigger than I originally thought and pushing close to the 80kg mark...
During the pitch he buzzes the bait another 2 or 3 times until I run out of room, he fades off the pitch bait and scoffs the two skip baits on 10kg as he passes out of the spread. OK, just remember to breathe, now pick up the rod, count to five, no, slower.... OK now ease the lever up to strike, HELL YEAH HOOKUP!
A quick decision is made and we cut the line to the second rod and he starts to peel line at a reasonable pace as the lines and teasers are cleared. (Which I might add now seems to take ten times longer than it ever has before.) We just clear the lines and the fish turns and hits top gear doing two enormous tail walks of perhaps 30-40m each as he charges the boat with me winding frantically to keep up and failing dismally, (thank god for circles) I think this may be because I‘m trying not to trip over my jaw that’s now on the deck of the boat. I have to tell you at this point that that tail walk is hands down the absolute coolest thing I have ever seen.
I think this burst wore him down and helped me a lot, he took 6 or 7 more runs each ending in jumps that were slowly reduced to lunges, we ran him down and got the wind-on on the reel for the first time at around the 20 minute mark, with the fish being within tagging range if we had any.
The fish then proceeded to take a dive at the boat that I couldn’t stop and slugged it out with us for the next 30 minutes or so with us having to periodically drive off it to plane it back up towards the surface and change our angle of attack. At the end of this stage we got the fish on the leader again before it sounded under the boat for the second time. By this stage I was VERY happy that I had finally brought a good rod bucket a couple of days before and had remembered to put it in the boat…. This was actually starting to hurt…
Another 20 minutes later and I was finally getting somewhere and starting to turn the fish and feeling confident when we got a wrap on the leader for the third time, when, you guessed it, it sounded again and the 10kg line finally gave up the ghost on what I will freely admit was a fair amount of pressure. I can tell you right now the stunned silence when the line parted was crushing…….
The end result? Well in reality we could have easily sunk a tag into the shoulder of the fish on three occasions so I’m well satisfied but it would have been nice to get a glove to the bill for a good boat side release photo as the glare played havoc with the camera and we didn’t get any decent pictures, still in the end I don’t really give a damn because where would I go from here?
Cheers,
John.
