Just returning from four days onboard KEKOA before our last charter for the season has once again shown me how every charter experience is unique and no two are the same. In saying this I talk about the things that can vary such as the weather, how many fish caught, types of fish caught or seen, size of fish, different locations along the reef and many more that I could mention.
In my four days we caught and released 4 black marlin up to 300lbs, and whilst they were not the 1000lbers that anglers come from far and wide to chase, they are still nice fish and they all had something unique to them with each individual capture. My marlin highlight was a bite at 6.50pm at night on the edge of darkness which saw the lit up marlin make some dazzling runs through the rays of the transom lights.
Fortunately for me the weather was the best that the fleet had endured for the past five weeks and this led to me having one of the most memorable days on the water that I will never forget. We had heard of some good captures out wide and decided to head out for the day 50 nautical miles later, we had found a long liner working huge schools of yellowfin and big eye tuna, with this in site we promptly set a laser pro in between the baits. It wasn’t long till we got a bite not on the laser pro, but a 200lb marlin had eaten the small scaley and was soon released safely.
We set the gear again but not long after, we had to retrieve it, we had come across a gentle giant of the sea a “Whale shark”, after a bit of coaxing from Capt Luke and Dingo; I decided to join Dean and Adam (Adam Cass former KEKOA crewman who joined me for the trip) in swimming with the giant. Dingo was certainly right, had I not decided to swim with the giant creature I would not have got to enjoy such a breathtaking experience.
Back on board with the baits and Laser pro in the water, it wasn’t long before we came across the tuna action, catching my first decent sized Big Eye tuna approx 40kg and two 30kg yellowfin in quick succession afterwards. The second yellowfin providing me with another great memory, the line suddenly went slack and I thought I had pulled the hook as I retrieved the line with ease, but this was not to be as Capt Luke and Dingo almost simultaneously called out Marlin, in fact it was an approx 700lber chasing my yellowfin into hiding under the boat. With that call my job was to push the drag to sunset and land the tuna before it got eaten, meaning that we may get a shot at the marlin as the baits went back in the water. All of this went to plan but the marlin decided to give the bait a miss and you couldn’t blame her as this was certainly a Marlin super market out here.
Whilst we never raised another marlin until the one we caught in darkness, our afternoon was certainly far from boring having some fun and getting awesome footage of the Tuna’s attacking a hookless stick bait at the back of the boat in a feeding frenzy similar I guess to what occurs in a tuna farm pen at feeding time.
How Cool Was This Place! 😀
