Well I'm still pinching myself over the events of Friday night/Saturday morning. Launched at Rags and headed over the bar about 7pm after getting everything together for the trip after work. Was very breeze inshore and almost thought about heading to Gannet for the night but decided to strt heading for the trench in hopes the breeze got weaker out wider which it did. Was a beautiful night to be steaming out to the trench and an eery and anxious feeling doing an overnighter to a spot some 56nm away from raglan in the dark for the first time ever!!! Was glad to see we had a couple mates out there.
We tried to look for some puka or bluenose sign but not much luck so after an hour or so doing a couple drops we decided to set two baits at about 1am.
2am something has a swipe at our shallow bait which woke us up then it got hit hard..... put the drag up to strike on a 24kg outfit and it screamed across the surface which looked pretty cool with the disco strobe easily visable before it went straight down taking about 300m. Went up and down a couple times and had a some real power compared to a stripey. It came up and did a jump/flip.... I only saw a silhouette but had though it was a big mako the way it flipped and didn't see a bill. We fought it hard since we thought it was a shark but the big deep runs it didn't had us wondering what it was. Second time with about 30m away from the boat it breached and saw a silhouette of a big sword on its face!!!! Were we seeing things???? We didn't know for sure. About the 45min mark it came up and never went back down and didn't fight the same ( later realised tail got sharked ). Once we got it to the leader we could see it was a sword. We had a little team talk to keep our cool and not get overwhelmed if it was to be sword which helped us in the end game. With my mate leadering the fish in I was still harnessed in and made the first gaff shot, then mate came in with another. That's when it started to sink in that we caught the first Sword on rod and reel out of Raglan...... something I had been wanting to do for a couple years now. Once we got it in the boat it was pretty special just realizing what we just did. Took a couple moments cracked a beer and some port and started heading home to get it weighed and processed. First sword for me and the boat so damn stoked.
Cant get the pic right way up?