Losing baits chop chop...

On Saturday 20^th June, At, Tammy, my Dad and I launched “AVANTI” out of Cape Vidal. We were hoping to get a sailfish for Tammy. We caught a few livies before putting out the sailfish spread… just incase.

Sunrise at Cape Vidal... Beautiful!

I had a similar setup as we used in Angola with 4 spinning rods and 4 halfbeaks. Two behind the teaser and two off the riggers. All were rigged with circle hooks and fluorocarbon leaders. There was an exceptional amount of bait in the water, from red eyes, maasbanker and mackerel to frigates and jube-jubes. The sounder was packed with bait showings. There was a current line at 45m so we focussed our efforts between 50 and 30m. It did not take long before there was a strike on the close bait. It was a wahoo that smashed the halfbeak then doubled back towards the teaser and picked up the main line in its mouth and then bit us off while still in freespool. Several turns later resulted in two more wahoo smashing the baits and neatly slicing the hooks off before the riggers even popped. Pretty frustrating… Luckily I had rigged several spare baits and leaders and could replace them as soon as they were lost.

Pre-rigging a few sailfish baits

At made a shallower turn and both close baits were eaten. Unfortunately both baits returned neatly sliced off behind the heads. I assumed that they were cuda but who knows. We made a few more turns but things were quiet. I decided to check the baits and found that both rigger baits were chopped. This was getting ridiculous…

We decided to stick to the current line to avoid the cuda and were rewarded with a dorado of around 6kg that found its way into the hatch… Finally! Trolling continued but it went very quiet, apart from a small yellowfin that crushed one of the long baits. With the fish being pretty shy due to the abundance of bait, I put the one long bait 50m back. At around 3pm, this rigger popped and Tammy fed the fish. When she tightened up, the line ran off the reel at a medium pace. All of us were looking back when the fish went on an exceptionally fast run on the surface. Through the white water it was making, we could see that it was a billfish, but we could not id it as a big sailfish or a small marlin. At had slowed the boat and we were bringing in the other lines when the fish went even faster! Before the drag could be slacked off, the 10kg line unfortunately parted. Not great…

We rerigged and trolled to the point before heading in. We had tried our best, but unfortunately that’s how it goes. I'm sure we will try again and hopefully be more successful.