I first had a look on swell map on Friday but the forecast for the Poor Knights area looked bumpy for the weekend. With the weather being so good on Saturday, I decided to take a drive up to Oakura on Sunday in any case. With my custom 51 litre Ultimate Rod Holder kit loaded up, I was on the water shortly after 10am, I decided to start trawling from the 120m mark as the temperature was in the low 23oC and looked very promising. I headed north towards Cape Brett at 7 knots pulling a purple 11 inch Pacific Pusher on a Shimano Backbone Elite 24kg stand up with a TLD 30 2 speed spooled with 15kg mono. The other side I had a Shimano MWS 15 to 24kg stand up with a TLD 25 spooled with 24kg mono pulling a yellow and green 11 inch Pacific Pusher.
After 2 hours of no activity I decided to go to the 150 mark and travel back to the Helena Bay area, after 2½ hours of traveling south I spotted birds in the distance. I got to them as fast as I could and found the water temperature right up to 23.8◦C; I trawled over this area for about 45 min. At this stage I was down to a quarter tank of fuel and did not feel like putting in my 2 x 10L cans. I decided it was time to go home, I set home on the chart plotter and decided to trawl until I got to the 100m mark. About 10 min into the last stretch it all happened.
FISH ON!!!!!!!!!!!! Purple Pacific Pusher had done the trick. With three fairly long runs away from me I had to follow it a few times, it was one of the most amazing aerial displays I have seen. Only then did I realised how badly I had to get one of Andrew’s Tachyon Cameras! After about 45 minutes I had it next to the ski, luckily for me it was fairly exhausted by then. My arms had next to no feeling by this time except pain. Luckily for the rush of adrenalin I managed to get the gaff in its mouth. My original plan was to tail wrap it but there was no way of getting to its tail. I decided to tie its bill to the front of the ski under the steering, towing it back using the rope and the gaff.
Man that was slow going. Two and a half hours later I was back at shore.
New problem! How do you load an 80 kg fish on the back of the Ute with no help?
After a few attempts I ended up sending my wife to get some help. Four serious sized fellows pitched up and gave me a hand. I passed them a few Skippies to say thanks, they were pretty pleased. From there I drove through to Tutukaka Game Base who were absolutely awesome waiting till 6.30pm for me to arrive. They were about as pleased as I was. All in all it was a great experience but there is a whole lot of improvement to be made in the towing back procedure. Hope to see you guys up here to get in on the action.
No comments:
Post a Comment