Ever Have One of Those Trips....

.... Where nothing seemed to work out right? Well, every so often, even mighty Superheroes like Me have a glitch or two in our normally flawless plans.

This disturbing revelation was revelated to me recently on a trip to North Cape on a mates boat, a beautiful, beamy, sedate Lady called Seclusion. The cunning plan we had laid out for this trip was to wend our way from Whangaroa to the Cape, trolling to pick up a Marlin on the way, the next day to nail a stack of bottom fish from the Fingers and then cruise home again to Whangaroa on the third day and catch another Marlin or two. 

An easy plan, and really I could see no particular flaw in it. So, off we set on our three day jaunt, brim full of confidence that we would be dining on smoked Marlin in just a very few days time..... Now I know there are those of you out there who may feel this to be a rather...ummm, well, cocky sort of attitude to such a fickle sport as game fishing, but in our previous trips last season, we had managed to work things out this way pretty well. Three Marlin trips, three marlin landed, no sweat really! I know to you gun fishoes out there this is not a huge tally, but for tyros like us, it was none too shabby really.Now the weather we had this trip was just a little lumpy, and it must be said, those of us not well dosed on those marvellous concoctions from the Paihia Pharmacy were more than a little green about the gills as we worked our way north into a sloppy easterly breeze-driven swell. It settled down once we rounded North Cape, and that was when we had our first bite at the Marlin-flavoured cherry.

Calling loudly for all hands on deck, I leapt back to the reel, as first the sickle tail danced briefly behind the dorsal, and as the marlin, a smallish fish from the look of it, charged in to smack the lure, the hissing flash of the bill-tip arcing over to hit the lure. With a crack, the line popped clear of the outrigger roller-troller, the marlin dragging off a good ten metres of line before dropping the lure.

Now this is a pretty common trick of the ol’ marlin, they will often come in, whack a lure (thinking naturally that it is a baitfish) and then dropping back to wait for this stunned mullet to fall back for easy eating. When this happens, it really pays to throw the reel into freespool, making the lure sag limply back towards the waiting fish. Giving it a count of one hundred (one, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred!), I slapped the reel back into gear, and cranked on it flat out, again feeling the fish snatch at the now fleeing “bait”.

Winding the lure in flat-tack to the boat raised the now very agitated marlin to the surface again, the fish lit up beautifully as it surged up behind the racing lure.... right to within 10 metres of the duck-board, when in a swirl of white water it finally lunged on the lure, immediately hooking up hard. Feeling the hook immediately, the fish came clear of the water, leaping a couple of metres clear of the wake, before landing and heading for Peru, dead astern. Line was peeling off the Tiagra 80 Wide, the 80lb line feeding cleanly off the spool... when suddenly with a sickening jolt and snap, the line parted! Eeek! This should not happen! This was 80lb line, and dammit I only had three-quarters strike drag on the reel, little more than 8kg of drag, what the dickens happened! We were all dumbfounded.

The line had napped cleanly, only a couple of inches off the rod-tip, and the reel was set on only about 80% of strike, or around 10kg pull over the rod tip. 37kg line should have easily coped with that! We were sore perplexed, let me tell you!

Oh well, Marlin number one stuffed up, we still had our return trip to go to get the smoked fish bonanza! We called it a day at that point and headed in to Tom Bowling for the night.

Next day we headed as planned for the Fingers, about half way to the Three Kings Islands, and, as expected, the fishing was great. Big snapper, tarakihi and trevally of around 10lbs average, as well as thumping big Blue cod up to a 9lb mini-puka made for a great days fishing, and certainly filled the freezer with a great pile of prime fillets. At anchor again in Tom Bowling, we were happy that we were now well primed and ready for our return marlin the next day. I nudged the drags back a little to around 9kg strike, just so that this suspiciously weak 80lb line would be even less stressed... I had my doubts about the fluro green line in question.

So, off we cruised, first crossing the mark of our previous strike, (nobody home) then angling south-east to cross the Garden Patch on the way to the “505”, a mark just south of there. Nothing all the way, until we finally came to the mighty “505”. Here, the easterly swell was humping up where the oceanic currents hit the submarine cliff faces 500 metres below us, the water was a deep cobalt blue, and schools of skipjack tuna were being harried from pillar to post by eagerly working birds... the place really screamed “Big Fish”.

Huge swells were a bit of a concern here, as we watched a couple of lifts of easily 4 metres rise behind the boat, but all such worries were instantly forgotten when again suddenly black fins slashed in behind this time the port ‘rigger.

Again we had the hit-and-run strike, this time though the marlin was far larger, we all could see the heft of this big Blue. Freespooling and winding brought the fish back in, charging in through the pattern following the large Purple and Black Black Magic lure, until it saw the “stinger” lure, a small Lumo, the rear-most lure in our trolling pattern, as the fleeing purple raced past. Seizing on the chance of this quick meal, the big marlin nailed the lumo, and with such a solid hook-up, we were certain we had a good shot at this fish at least!

The nylon was brand new, spooled just the previous week at the shop in Auckland, a full spool of good 80lb line. Because of this, we had no worries about line capacity, so letting the fish take line (the more line it has to drag around the ocean (within reason) the faster it’ll tire the fish you see). Well, all was going to plan... we had cleared the other lures from the water, we had our angler “in the chair” and all ready to take the rod from it’s holder , the skipper was by the cockpit controls just about to start get into backing down on the fish when.... the ratchet stopping its steady purr. Huh?

Had the fish dropped the lure? Was it swimming towards us? Looking to the rod tip I saw the heavy 37kg rod bending over at an impossible angle, loading up way more than it should, when with a crack like a rifle-shot, again the fish was free. Whaa-aat!!

The explanation was soon blazingly obvious. Looking at the now half empty spool, I could see that the nylon had buried itself into the spooled line, thereby jamming and snapping off even heavy 37kg line. The reason it could do this was that the nylon had been spooled in the shop so loosely that I could actually push the line in with my thumbs, a huge no-no with any properly laid line.

Although the line had been packed tight as a drum on the top of the spool, as it should be, to prevent such irritating disasters as this, it was certainly treated far more cavalierly further into the spool. There was considerable usage of earthy early anglo-saxite colloquialisms then, I can tell you. Often rhyming with Aquatic Avian of the family Anatidae. Look it up.

Well, what to do? Just to be one the safe side, we re-set all the drags to only 7kg pull (light even for 24kg line), and hoped that our surviving lines would cope with any further strikes. Off we went again, trying to find one marlin we could actually land!

Doing a last big loop around this fishy stretch of water, blow me down if only 10 minutes later, another shivering fin rose behind a lure. Behind the hot green lure off the other outrigger first the dorsal, then the sickle of the tail fin came out of the water. This time we were all right beside the reels, and as soon as the fish hit the lure, I was on hand to work the lure should it be needed.

Whack! the line pulled taut as the marlin, this time just a normal sized fish of around 90kgs or so, seized the lure, the outriggers release clip snapped open perfectly, but there was no loading up on the reel. Thinking the fish had dropped the lure, I threw the reel into freespool... but there was no drag on the line to pull it off the spool. With a sinking feeling, I realised that somehow or another we had lost another damn lure! Aaargh!

We really could not believe this. Luck! Man, we had none! I have never lost lures through line breakages like this before, and at a hundred bucks a pop, these lost lures were making for an expensive trip!

On this rod we were using a wind-on leader system, a much neater and easy to use system than the normal long (up to 8m) trace lying on the cockpit floor when “leadering” a fish. You simply wind on all that heavy 400lb mono onto your reel, it is a system that is widely used overseas, but something of a novelty here.

Following the instructions of the shop, the skipper had simply attached the heavy dacron loop on the end of the wind on leader to the bimini loop of the mainline in a simple loop-to-loop connection. The line had been snapped cleanly right in the middle of this join, with the two little twisted bits of line clearly showing where the line had failed.

We were severely depressed. What else could go wrong? Well, as it happened, nothing... but only because we had no further strikes as we headed on in to Whangaroa.

The skipper was pretty perturbed at the ease with which this good 37kg line had popped three times in a row (me, I was more in mourning for my lost lures), and so had the line tested by Kilwell in Rotorua (I hasten to add this was not a brand carried by Kilwell), and to our considerable interest found that this IGFA rated 37kg line broke at 22.80 kgs straight pull, and 22.5 kg knot strength. Not exactly inspirational peperformance I thought! 

Why these lines should have parted at the light drags set on the Tiagra 80Ws I do not know. I checked and re-checked all the rollers on the rods and all the roller-troller release clips, everything was ticketty-boo. I guess we were just plain unlucky. Grrr. Still, the way I look at it, we have got all our stuff-ups out of the way in one trip, from now on I am sure everything will be sweetness and light, and maybe even next time there will be smoked marlin for tea!