I have gone full circle with swords in the last 15 years. In late 2000, when I joined the newly-launched charter boat Primetime, I’d never seen a swordfish in the flesh, only read and dreamed about them. But Primetime’s owner and skipper, John Gregory, had seen plenty of swords in his 25 years as a commercial fisherman. So we fished the far offshore banks, mounts and canyons where he had encountered the best concentrations of swordfish, and we applied trial and error while developing ways of catching them on rod and reel.

This turned out to be one of the most exciting periods of my life: we were pushing out new frontiers in the hunt for the giant swordfish we knew were there, and learnt more every night as we figured out how best to drift and troll baits in the darkness. Every day I couldn’t wait to pull in the marlin lures, even when the bite was hot, because night time was sword time!

Often we would fight fish all through the night. Big fish, too – our average-size sword in the first season was over 240kg. So the word was out, but still only a handful of charter boats and even fewer private boats fished for swords. It was a long way offshore and the night fishing was a step too far for many. So instead, anglers who wanted to test themselves against a swordfish booked charters, which was great for us – more nights out and more adventures!

But after several seasons of sword fishing, the allure wore off a little, thanks to the fatigue of sleepless nights and the grind of steering a chair for hours while slugging it out with an unseen beast in the cold blackness. Not surprisingly, I came to prefer the visual 10-minute fights of striped marlin in the warmth of the day.

After finishing crewing on Primetime and Ultimate Lady, I went a couple of years without catching a sword and didn’t miss it. But during this time a few charter boats began having some success catching swordfish by day. This mildly interested me, but I thought it was cheating – swordfish don’t fight as hard during the day, and, well, it’s daytime! It seemed like half the adventure of sword-fishing was gone if you could do it in daylight.

But then I thought about having a crack in my trailer boat, figuring the smaller size of my boat and the stand-up tackle used might make up for the mystique lost when fishing in daytime. The rig we used was a simple one explained to me over the phone by a local charter skipper. It basically involved a 4.5kg sacrificial breakaway weight attached to the bait by five metres of 6kg mono (but eventually I found that a 3kg weight and 3kg mono worked even better).

It took four or five drops to get a reliable breakaway weight and tangle-free bait presentation, but once this was achieved, I started catching swords.

Sure, for the most part the fights were easier than when targeting swords at night, but seeing these beasts leaping clear of the water during the day more than made up for that. Around half the fish would jump or even charge the boat early on in the fight, and every now and then we would get a tough fish. These ones never came up near the surface.

Eventually I began to fish for swords out of my smaller boat, a 5.5-metre centre-console Stabicraft – not as a stunt or to make it more of a challenge, but because I could launch the smaller boat off a beach near home and be sword fishing an hour later.

I spent some great days fishing for swords in my centre-console, but two were particularly memorable – both for the swordfish and the mako sharks!

The first was while we were filming. I’d decided to catch a swordfish on a hand-line, as I like the irreplaceable feel and rawness of going one-on-one with big fish that the hand-line provides; it’s a recurring theme on The ITM Fishing Show. However, while giant bluefin tuna, marlin, dogtooth tuna, mako and white sharks had all been hand-lined, I’d not caught a sword on a hand-line yet.

So I devised a way to get the bait set 600 metres down below a perfect, glassy sea. (And yes, this one was a bit of a stunt!)

I had a mate with me, Julian, a good fisherman, but he’d never caught a billfish. So, for the first time ever, I set out two swordfish baits: one on a hand-line for me, and one on a Tiagra 80W for Julian.

This meant attaching a float to the hand-line and moving about 100 metres away so a second bait could be dropped for Julian.

As the rod’s bait was plummeting with three kilos of steel attached to it, I felt a bump transmit up the line, so clamped my hands on the rapidly spinning spool to break the sacrificial weight off. Immediately afterwards I felt two more bumps – likely the side-to-side slashing motion a sword makes on prey before eating it.

“Julian, put the gimbal on – that’s a bite!” I said.

But rather than spring into action to fight his first billfish, Julian just stood and stared back at me with a puzzled look on his face. I could understand what he must be thinking: “Shouldn’t there be a screaming reel and a leaping fish? What about the chaos and excited screams and shouts? Where is the buckled rod and the crackling line?”

By this time the line had gone completely slack, so I wound the handle a few times and the line went slack again.

“Yep, we’ve got ’em on, bro,” I informed Julian.

His perplexed look now changed, and he broke into sarcastic laughter. He now thought I was taking the piss and hamming things up for the camera. Not surprising really: the whole trip out I’d been telling him that swords were “ten times tougher than marlin” and this didn’t reconcile with the slack line he was seeing.

So I continued to wind, all the while explaining to camera what was going on, knowing that our viewers would also struggle to understand that the most powerful of all the big-game fish was attached to the line.

Before I knew it, the spool was almost full, with the line still slack and starting to angle up. I turned to Julian: he still had no gimbal on – he simply didn’t believe there was a sword on the line…

Then it jumped. This saw Julian scrambling for the gimbal, but there was no time; I passed him the rod saying, “Just wind!”

Next, I leaned on the throttle and sped forward, hoping to get the fish while it was thrashing wildly on the surface.

Sure enough, it was still there, so I put the boat into neutral and grabbed the leader.

“You watch the helm,” was the next instruction as the sword commenced to swim in an arc, and as soon as its sword went under the hull, I leaned back to hold its head tight against the hull. This negates the danger of the sword, but leaves the tail free to thrash; we got wet, but the tag went in and the hook came out.

The camera was still rolling, so I set up for the high-five to close the scene, but Julian was stunned and left me hanging there. He was still trying to process that we’d just tagged and released a sword – only a small one at 80kg, but still a sword and his first billfish.

But there was no time for us to celebrate Julian’s milestone, as the float attached to my hand-line came past us doing about four knots toward the shelf.

“Right, we’d better grab that float. There’s a sword on there, too,” I quipped. Yes, it’s ridiculous, but true.

My wiring gloves were still on, so I grabbed the 4mm cord hand-line and started hauling. This fish was sitting a couple of hundred metres down and swimming purposefully out to sea.

“It’s a good one, bro. This is what the big ones do,” I explained.

This time Julian believed me, so took the helm to ease the load on the line.

As the line steadily coiled up on deck, I got to my 100-metre line marker, and the steady weight changed suddenly to violent thrashing.

“Here are the big head shakes – get ready for the jumps!”

The line was now singing through my gloves and drowning out my excited jabber. Then boom! Up she came in front of us, a full three metres in the air, in a mako-style summersault.

“Oh, look at it! It’s a huge one, bro!” was the best I could muster. It thrashed on the surface, the bill waving in a wide arc, and then the line suddenly went slack…

“Arrrgggh! Pulled the hook! But it’s still up on top – let’s get over there!”

I’ve free-tagged swords before after the hook has come out, so we accelerated towards the melee, with me leaning out over the bow with a tag pole as if charging on horseback into a medieval jousting match.

As we arrived, the wild thrashing subsided, and a huge shape sunk a metre under the foaming surface, so I took a stab with the tag pole and it hit something hard.

“Yes! The tag’s in,” I announced, after seeing the empty tag pole.

But the tag wasn’t in – it hadn’t been reloaded after the last swordfish. And besides, the fish I’d hit wasn’t even a sword, turning out to be a mako shark chewing on the broadbill.

What an unbelievable sight: the massive shark looked more like a great white as it shook the big sword from side to side, making the latter seem small in comparison. I had no words to adequately describe what I was seeing, so there was just a chain of expletives until I became a director again.

“Just film that!” I bellowed to Dave, our cameraman, my directing being just as bad as my presenting.

“Reverse!” I then shouted to Julian as the mako dragged the torn-up sword under the hull. But in his haste to get moving backward, Julian inadvertantly knocked the kill switch and the engine stopped. There I was with the flying gaff, ready to try and reclaim my swordfish from the jaws of the mako only metres away, but instead we were suddenly drifting helplessly, unable to restart the engine.

In our panic, I didn’t think to check the kill switch. Instead, I ripped the cover off the outboard, Julian grabbed a screwdriver, and we shorted the solenoid switch on the starter motor. Then, upon firing into life, we zipped over and sunk the gaff into the swordfish.

But the mako was not done with it and not about to let us have it! After gnawing on the boat’s sides, he began making charges, bumping its heavy shoulder into the hull, causing the boat to lurch so much we had to hold on. We figured it was not a good time to lose our balance and end up in the water.

“This is gonna make sweet footage,” I said aloud. (No one would believe the size of this mako, but we had it on film now – yes!)

I then snapped out of my TV producer mindset because we still had to get this fish on board while there was still something left.

With the gaff rope around the bill and a whole lot of hissing and grunting, we hauled it in, just as the mako lurched to grab it.

My boat was a mess! Around 700 metres of tangled hand-line covered the deck, which was also strewn with a tipped-up tool box, the tag pole, gaff poles, gaff ropes, and now a big sword that filled the entire port side from stern to bow. But that didn’t matter, and my satisfaction at having got the sword on board was magnified by the knowledge we’d got the whole wild scene on film.

The remains of the sword went 246kg, which gives some scale to the mako that held it in its jaws and tossed it around!

I’m philosophical about sharks these days: they are just going about the business of catching themselves something to eat. So although I had wanted to release that sword, I don’t blame the shark for being a shark. It also seemed kind of appropriate: just as I had robbed Julian of his first swordfish-fight experience by chasing his fish down and grabbing the leader before it settled down, this mako had robbed me of some of my swordfish glory.

Fortunately, only weeks later, Julian took the few basic tips I had given him and caught one himself. And on my very next sword-fishing outing in my little Stabi’, I caught a couple more swords, too; one of them was a beast that put up an epic 11-hour fight throughout the night, climaxing when another huge mako attacked it – but that’s another story.