What Does It All Mean?

As the old joke goes, while under way we did quite a bit of fishing but not much catching. The score­card:

Caught:

• Two dorado (mahi-mahi)

• One wahoo

• One tuna (couldn’t tell whether yellowfin, albacore, or maybe even ahi (the meat was really red))

All were quite small, 5 lbs or less; one dorado was so small we threw it back. The ones we cooked were all were delicious.

Hooked or lost:

• One marlin, estimated at 6 feet, which Ryan had to cut loose lest it strip all the line off the reel or even tear the rod completely out of Ryan’s hands

• One mystery fish big enough to completely snap the hook embedded in a lure Jordan custom-tied for me

• Another mystery fish that left impressive bite marks and scars all over the Rapala lure we were using at the time yet somehow avoid all the hooks

• Two or three other fish we lost during the reeling-in battle.

Of course, all the fish we lost were gigantic (and getting bigger with every retelling of this part of the story) and presented truly epic battles. Epic, I tell you, epic.

For fishing nerds who care about the techie details, our gear includes two Penn reels, a big 114 Senator I brought with me and a 113 that was already on board. The 114 was, until the marlin arrived, wound with about 350 yards of 80-lb test braid and fifty yards or so of 50-lb test monofilament leader. Now it has perhaps 250 yards of just the 80-lb braid. I’ll probably put a few yards of steel leader on. The 113 is wound with 275 yards of 50-lb mono. The reels are attached to a couple of stout 7-foot rods that somehow haven’t broken yet. We have an assortment of lures that includes several of Jordan’s custom hand-tied flies, a couple of Rapalas, three or so hoochees, and some funny rattling hoochee-like thing that drove the fish crazy.

I suspect that while fish can swim really fast, we were probably making too much speed through the wa­ter for optimal fishing. We spent a lot of time between 6 and 9 knots; you expert fishermen out there will know better than I but I think trolling is best accomplished at around 3 or 4 knots.

Also, on a radio net conversation one morning I heard another boat under way in the same general sec­tion of the ocean saying they had caught absolutely nothing in the nearly three weeks they had been un­der way.

I did make an offering of Abuelo (Panamanian rum) to Neptune upon departing the mainland. Maybe it’s time for another supplication.