Sword Hunting (11/2)

[Latimeria]

The season is winding up and my buddy wanted to give it a try.  I don't actually have everything dialed in yet with my gear, so I felt it would be good to get a run in and get our system set.

Swords have been slow this last week and not much happening, but we were going to give it our best.  The afternoon was supposed to get really windy so our window was small.

Except for dodging cones for some race going on, we launched to an empty ramp.



It was weird not getting bait, but I had some jumbo market squid and tuna bellies I was going to sew up a Surf and turf rig.

I sewed it up as we left the inlet.



I really like how it came out and it had a nice side to side swimming action.  I dug it even if the swords weren't around to enjoy my offering.

Bait thread was only added insurance.





We tried multiple depths depending on where we saw the bait on the meter.  600....850....1000....



Then it was typical sword fishing.  We made 4 long drifts along the edge with 3 other boats and none of us had a bite.  We were watching each other with Gyros which was pretty funny.  Imaging grabbing the gyros to see what the other boat is doing and the first thing you see is them with their gyros staring right back at you.  hahaha

We then had fun and deep dropped 1300' and the last 3 drop with 3# of weight.  First drop and got picked clean.  It took the electric reel over 10 minutes to reel up the line.  My arm would have fallen off if I had to do that manually.

Second drop and I'm slammed!  It was coming up and I was guessing Blackgill or Blackcod, but 300' up and it fell off.
I pulled it up and rebaited.  As it was hitting the 1000' mark on the drop the rod almost jumped out of the rod holder and doubled over, then nothing.  No bend in the rod, no weight on the line, so I thought I was hooked up, but the rig was broken in half and the line was all abraded, so I'm pretty sure it was slammed by a Big Eye thresher if I had to guess since it was still 300' off the bottom.

In any case, it was time to go, but I felt pretty good with the system we were putting in place.  I actually feel pretty good about doing some deep dropping again only to be ready in case a shark bites it on the drop again.  That was pretty cool.

Well, no swords, but thanks for reading!

[jrodda]

Cool to get that bigeye thresher bite! I hear they don't taste anywhere as good as their common/pelagic cousin, but they are still on my bucket list.

Glad you finally gave swords a shot, looking forward to more reports on it.

[Tim524]

Will the shoulder survive the Big Game, I'm sore just thinking about it