Fish of Dreams……gone!!

The end of January saw us fishing with Sami Gandour from Salty Water tackle after 4 years we have been in contact for a long while but the trip finally materialised. There were a few jittery moments with visas taking longer than usual to come though, so it makes sense to apply well in advance. They finally made it to Port Blair and we were ready to go.

The first day we were full of expectation and excitement and could not wait to get out on the water and into fish..


The boat ride out on day 1


We started of with multiple hits, the were a couple of good size fish that came up but the guys could not stay connected and the fish got away. Aneil was on his first ever GT trip and Igor on his second so we have to cut them some slack as well.


 
Aneil pulled this fish out from really shallow water 3-5 meters so as the trip progressed they got better.


Igor with his shallow water GT as well


Next morning Aneil has his first run in with a dog tooth tuna, it game him a good fight and a first experience of how the can pull…

A first doggie and a happy angler, things went down hill from here on the dogs unfortunately…


Igor with his shark he took on the Gamma stick-bait, luckily all recovered and shark released to fight another day.

Igor fighting a really big GT, after many lost strikes this morning, there were huge explosions on the poppers but no hook-ups and this is where the little extra experience can really play its part.


Utter disappointment for Igor here, big fish lost almost at the leader with both hooks gone, I had a glimpse of this fish close to the boat and would put it well over 40 kg


The “gamma” with another victim, this worked really well. 


Sami putting the Racepoint rod to the test on a decent GT


The Result


We managed to release this big barra that took the “siren” stickbait


More decent fish to boat and bigger ones lost.


I have to talk about day 4 morning because it was insane, we are jigging one of our deep spots and have a few hits, there fish marking get higher and higher in the column and we decide to try switch to poppers/ stick baits, then we had a take close to the boat it was a huge doggie..
More takes and then hook up, but we just could not stay connected, Gamakatsu GT recorders opened up, hook pulls line breaks, all on huge dog tooth tuna, but luck just did not favour us this day. Aneil had a hit that was so aggressive his popper went 6 feet into the air!!! Can you believe this…. All in all we had 6 hook ups with not one landed…..average size of fish estimated at least 50kg


As we moved away from the spot more decent fish came to the boat but not the big bad boys.




Sami with his consolation dog tooth this is a baby compared to the ones we lost, on the last session Aneil hooked a marlin on popper but it came off on the first run.
This was certainly a trip to remember, so near and yet so far, the insanity of the attacks of monster fish and pause for thought that when you land a great fish how truly lucky you are that everything came together for you as an angler that day.

 

Tight lines