With the departure of Wilson and his group we brought the season to a close a week earlier than expected. A Volcano of all things in Iceland robbed our next group of some great fishing in the Andaman Islands. We were happy with the results of our 2009/10 season. We'd caught bigger and better fish than expected, sharpened our skills a little more, found some great areas especially for jigging in places we hadn't looked at and had gained a season's worth of new friends from across the world.
After a week of much needed rest we decided to try out our new Cat to practically see how good a platform she was to pop and jig from. We waited a couple of days for Pat to join us from Singapore and headed out for a day of fishing with our staff.
A small grouper, one of many caught by Dilip light jigging off some shallow reefs, while the rest of us popped. Light jigging has really opened up many avenues here with continuous action and a wide variety of species being landed.
Shambhu and Kantha posing with a nice grouper that came up and smashed a popper. Grouper here readily come up to take large poppers fished slowly off a reef. They're often one strike fish and seldom come for a popper twice if they miss on the first attempt.
Another small yet greedy GT that hammered a popper right beside the boat.
Pat having a laugh watching the boys groan and sweat while fighting their fish. They're normally the ones watching and giving advise, so it was great to see them doing some actual work for once!
Pat was into his own fish soon after and was in for a long fight. As luck would have it the strike was on the lightest outfit we had. After what seemed like half an hour (a long time by popping and jigging standards), the fight turned in Pat's favour and it seemed like he started gaining on the fish. The fish then made a second unstoppable run and won it's freedom. A pity and we're guessing it was a really large GT.
Dilip with a nice popper caught GT!
Shambhu with a GT he fought up to the surface on jig.
We were now on the drop and we had schools of mid water fish marking on our fish-finder. Some of the arcs showed there were some beasts under us and we chose to drop jigs for the remainder of the day. On one of our first drifts in an area we were exploring Dilip's rod bent over and reel began to scream. After a quick and hard fight he brought up this super GT.
Shambhu posing with a jig caught GT from a double hookup, while Dilip struggles with his Doggie in the back ground.
Dilip's Doggie was smashed by a bigger one on its way up and what a fish that was. His 10+ kilo Doggies was smashed by a bigger one. We were in awe looking at the size of the bite marks on the fish. Proof we have some monsters waiting for us. After a couple of hours of jigging we decided to call it a day and head back to Port Blair.
Darran & Akshay.
