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FishingThey're out there, all you need to do is catch 'em. We dragged lures for thousands of miles, only occasionally catching fish. After I met Scott Bannerot (who wrote "The Cruiser's Guide to Fishing"), I got more serious about fishing, and as you might expect, began to catch more fish. We now run fairly simple gear; not expensive, and usually (but not always) manage to catch fish when we intend to. The big secret is to use gear suited to the fish you're targeting (which in the ocean, means heavy gear), to sharpen your hooks so they're needle sharp (better hookup rate), and drag a variety of lures to find the "flavor of the day". It works. About this sectionYou could fill a bookstore with fishing books. I'm going to tell you about gear that works for catching large fish from your cruising sailboat. This gear works for smaller fish, too. Just use small lures. Big lure = big fish. Small lure = small fish. Otherwise, the techniques and gear are the same. There's nothing wrong with catching a 5 pound tuna on 400 pound line if your motivation is dinner! Sport or food?We don't often mess with rod and reel gear anymore; that stuff is for sport. If you want to catch food, you want to win as often as possible, and you don't particularly care about being sporting. We use 400 pound test handlines unless we want to play a fish. Normally, we're sailing along at 7 to 9 knots, and if we hook a fish on the handline we just pull it in and flip it into the cockpit (unless it's big, in which case we gaff it and deal with it on the swim step). It's all over in a couple of minutes. If you're using a rod/reel setup with 50 pound test line, you're going to have to stop the boat if you hook a large fish, or risk losing your lure, hook, and a lot of line. We don't want to bother when we're sailing fast. Not to mention, you could easily spend 2-3 hours tiring and landing a large marlin... Hence, we stick to handlines when we're sailing. If we specifically want to fish for sport using a rod and reel, we motor so that we can maneuver easily. Topics
February, 2006: Aur, Marshall Islands. As every guy knows, size DOES count. This yellowfin tuna weighed a little over 100 pounds, which is big enough to win many fishing competitions! By comparison, I'm just over 70 inches tall and weigh about 145 pounds. We gave most of it to the residents here, who were extremely happy to receive it. We don't target large fish unless we anticipate being somewhere that we can share the meat. Our freezer just isn't that big, and we don't want to waste a bunch of meat. |
