So after having the best part of my fishing year ruined due to being required to work in the middle of a desert, I finally got to go fishing a couple of weeks ago with my other half. We met up in Los Angeles for the flight to Hawaii, a few days there on the beach for her to get over the worst of the jet-lag and then we flew down to CI for a couple of weeks fishing.
Our intention was to fish mainly for GTs, however after a spectacularly unproductive first week we were beginning to question our strategy. Best we could manage was some small GTs and Bluefin Trevally:
There were plenty of small bonefish to be had, but to be honest I tend to lose interest in these pretty quickly and go and do something daft - chasing triggers
. Anyone who has caught one will tell you how strong these fish are, they also know every sharp bit of coral and hole on the flat and they'll make a bee-line straight for them. They also have teeth and jaws strong enough to crush hooks. So all in all you need a good deal of luck to land one. I managed to get three crackers, unfortunately I didn't have my camera on me for number 1, and for numbers 2 and 3 I inadvertently had my camera set to take low res video instead of stills
- I sort of salvaged the situation with this frame-grab:
Week two was better, the quality of the bonefish improved (mainly due to a joint decision to target them specifically). This is Tracy showing she's as bad with cameras as I am - the 'A' setting is not auto, it is for aperture priority - she took a lot of over-exposed pics
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You can tell this was week 2 as I've got tanned hands and face - the rest of me was white as a sheet
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Whilst walking the rough edges of a flat one I came across a sandy clearance - and this fish was sat pretty much in the middle of it:
A Striped Trevally, a new species for me and very definitely the highlight of my trip.
The GT fishing remained hard, although we were getting shots at fish we were suffering from refusal after refusal, often after chasing the fly pretty much to the rod-tip. The head guide suggested that this may have been due to the amount of chumming going on in the lagoon. We saw this ourselves, 'fly-anglers' stood shoulder to shoulder for hours on end in the same spot hoping to attract the fish to them. I'm pretty sure a fed Trevally loses some of its aggressive edge
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Any how, we both did eventually manage a GT or two:
The weather, despite what it looks like in the photos, wasn't that great. It was blow-your-hat-off windy most days (the buffs came in really handy for securing the caps to our heads). We also lost the light on several afternoons, at which point it also went a little chilly.
Oops, I forgot the Goatfish pic
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Thanks for reading.
Christmas Island Pics
), however when things seemed perfect and the fish had changed course to follow the fly we just didn't get as many positive takes as I felt we should have.
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What was the weight estimate of yours and Tracy's GT's.
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