TIME TO BREAK OUT THE BIG GEAR!

We had a five man crew at Westport this weekend Mike L, Corey B. Eric C and my self  . The overall fishing conditions were very good . The water was nice and flat with almost no wind.

We fished tuna both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday we had to work a bit for our fish. Our day consisted of mainly singles on the troll and very few bait fish. We did get five troll fish at one time but even then we could not get a good bait bite going.  We stuck with it and ended the day with28 tuna with our biggest being a very nice 36 pounder.

Sunday  we caught most of our fish on live bait.  We were well on our way to having a very good day and already had 55 tuna in the boat when it happened. One of our troll rods went off. It was A heavy duty 5’6 rod with a Penn 114 filled with  80lb power pro with  5 feet of  150lb mono leader crimped to a mag 20 x-rap. We could tell right away this was a good fish but we did not expect the fight we ended up getting!  Rob grabbed the rod and the fish spent the next 10  minutes stripping line off the real! The rod was passed to Mike, I did a quick drag check and tightened it down a bit but the fish did not seem to mind one bit in fact it spent the next 2 hours pulling out drag none stop; He would take  ¾ of the spool and we would run after him to get it back then he would take  ¾ of the spool and we would run back up on him to get some line back.

Once in a while the fish would dive all the way to the bottom then he would head back up near the top. After the  two hour mark we really cranked down the drag! And the fish continued to strip out the line but after another ½ hour he began to slow down  this was the first sine that we might have a chance to land the fish. Slower and slow he got till we could stop the fish for a  second by holding the line. 1 or 2 seconds at first then 5  or 10 seconds as the fight went on. we knew we were wearing it down but were  still unable to move the fish at all! At the three hour mark we believe the fish died. The fish started dropping straight down and we could not stop it the weight of the fish alone even throw we believe it was dead was too much for us the gain line or even hold in place so  we put the boat in gear and tried to plane him up and it worked We got to the point where the drag was no longer coming off the real and now we teamed up on it. Mike worked the real and I hand lined it in inch by inch. Sometimes  We would gain 6 to 8 inches per swell  other times we would lose a foot or two but we were  finally making some progress we spent the next hour  slowly working the fish in. We had more than ¾ of the line back on the real and we were feeling pretty good about our chances  of getting it to the boat.  I was quite happy that it was dead and we would not be trying to deal with a live beat when we got it to the boat. We had the deck cleared and all the gaffs and harpoons ready but it never got to that point we figured we had less then ½hour left till we would have seen it but the line snapped at the tip of the rod.  After 4 hours 10 minutes it was all over. we could see a large mass on the sonar just 150 feet down.  We will never know for sure what it was but I have my ideas. When the line snapped not a word was said we knew we had done everything we could have. we  headed for the cab and started our run back in, we reached Westport well after dark but at least we had cleaned all  55 of our tuna during the battle.