Catching Big (But Wrong) Fish

We’ve had a variety of sea life surrounding our fishing boat this summer – and we’ve caught a few that we weren’t fishing for. The shark pictured was a relatively small one – about 6 feet - but he was well hooked, so Doug had to pull him in to release him.  This was just a few days after we “caught” the biggest fish in the sea when a Humpack swam thru our gear and took out our outside starboard line.

Doug saw the whale breach about 100 yards off and then he started swimming toward us. He kept coming so Doug revved the engine several times to ensure he heard us and knew we were here. He finally looked up at us when he was about 50 feet off our starboard bow – heading for a Tbone with us. He dove toward us and within seconds the gear on that side of the boat starting jumping. BIG FISH ON! Our gurdies are mounted on davets and they started to strain and jump like maybe he would pull them right off the boat, but then the line snapped. He surfaced and did an awkward full body roll with flippers flopping every which way. He was as spooked as we were!

 

We were lucky - we only lost 1 line. There are 2 on that side of the boat and had he gotten tangled in both of them it could have been a lot worse! We lost a cannonball, about 10 fathoms of wire (60 feet) and all the tackle (plus fish we had already caught) attached to it.

 

Doug was able to make repairs, replace the gear and we kept on fishing. Fish and Game has left King Salmon open for fishing into September this year (very unusual) so we will keep at them until we hear differently. There doesn’t seem to be a lot still around but we are finding some nice big Cohos – like the lovely I’m holding in this picture. These are the only big fish we want to keep on catching!


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