Beginners Luck; Gracefully Out-Fished by a Novice
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We continued to troll the same area looking for dorado. Phil was a little tired from that wahoo so he offered to handle the camera for a while and take pictures. Most people don’t realize the power these fish have, and just how much work fishing can be. Mike and I both caught a few more needlefish and the captain decided to change our position and tactic. We pulled out a little further from the shore. I reeled in my bait, Mike was told to leave his out. The captain cut up a few pieces of the squid and tossed them in with my bait in the middle. We pulled out a ton of line so when we drifted away we wouldn’t pull the bait out of the group. The big white chunks of squid slowly sank together as we drifted away to be devoured by tuna.
With so much slack in the line, even after drifting away, we could actually watch the line being pulled out by the tuna it only took a split second and then the fight was on. Thus far the strongest fish I’ve fought here in La Paz have been Pargo, more commonly known as Snappers, and the tactics to catch them are very similar. However, Pargo and even the big Amberjack have no where near as much power as these Yellowfin Tuna. It could easily take over 10-15 minutes to bring a tuna within reach of the gaff. Once gaffed the tuna would completely freak out, not suprising, however it was more like an autonomic response in their tail and it would pulse at what looked like a hundred miles an hour. In every case somebody got a face full of water, and though it was mostly our captain he seemed to agree that it was amusing.
After a photo with my tuna I decided to get Phil back to fishing and have Mike sit next to the captain. Sure enough, it only took a few minutes before our captain had Mike hooked into a tuna. After a quick photo, we pulled back to the same spot to drop the bait and drift away. It was almost like clockwork, after about five minutes or so of drifting and the bait slowly falling, it was tuna time. One after another, Mike and I even had a double header, we pulled in tuna after tuna.
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