Some big fish up the coast....
 

I don't post much here anymore, but I had a fun experience this weekend I thought I'd share.

My friend Andy and I were fishing up the coast a bit from Santa Barbara. We spent about an hour trying to make bait, and the pretty much only thing I was catching was little sand dabs (or juvenile halibut?), juvenile rockfish, and big smelt (10-12") which we just kept throwing back.

We decided to give up and paddle towards a big kelp bed about a mile away to throw some plastic, and I decided to troll one of the precious few baits I had. It was maybe 6" long. I was running 50# braid with a 30# leader about 3-4' long. I had a 4 oz egg sinker rigged "carolina" style on the braid,with a bead and swivel between the braid and the mono leader. Really a bottom-fishing rig, but I was too lazy to swap it out just to transition a mile or so...

About 200 yds off shore in about 30' of water, I dropped it down to the bottom, began paddling, then stripped out maybe another 20' of line (so I probably had 40 to 60 feet out, total). Since I didn't have rod holders on the yak for trolling (I use this yak for free-dive spearfishing), I tucked the rod behind my back and just leaned against it while I paddled and Andy & I chatted.

After about 50 yards of paddling, it got whacked. I stopped to make sure I wasn't snagged on something, then my clicker started screaming. I mean screaming.

I let it run while I tucked my paddle under one leg (I forgot my paddle leash) and pulled the rod out. I braced myself with my legs in the water on either side of the yak, took a breath, then threw the reel into gear. The drag in my newly rebuilt Daiwa SLO30SH began hissing as line stripped away and my rod went BENDO!!!! The drag was pretty tight, so the kayak snapped into line with the fish pulling me, and off we went for a "sleigh ride"... I was out in the open, not near any kelp, so I knew this was going to be a great fight!

Of course, at this point my mind is working overtime trying to deduce what it might be. It hit a live bait mid-water... Single take, no pause... Heading for the kelp bed about 200 yds away.... DEFINITELY big and strong... Nothing broke the surface - instead the fish went straight down, and began heading for some kelp. I tightened the drag a bit more to let the kayak put more strain on the fish and tried to "steer" the fish away from the kelp bed, but could not turn its head. I began thinking it was a big WSB, since every thresher I've ever caught has made many leaps through the air and this one was running like a freight train down through the water.

I got nervous as we headed towards a big kelp bed, and really tried putting some muscle into the fish, knowing I'd lose it anyway if it got into the kelp. Suddenly the line went slack, and I started reeling in like crazy as the fish reversed direction. I brought in the excess line and the fish then pulled me straight towards Andy, who was following about 20 yds behind me with two trolling lines out. Oh NO!!! "ANDY GET THOSE LINES OUT OF THE WATER!!!" I yelled as the line slackened again and I desperately caught up to the slack in the line.

Whew, close call! l felt the fish still there, because as soon as he felt me tug, he took off again like a bat out of Hell and began pulling my kayak so fast that I had a wake coming off my bow. "OK, this is no WSB" I thought as I dropped both my legs into the water to try and create some drag. No way it was a WSB the way it kept going and going like the Energizer Bunny. I could not slow it down at all or turn it; was just along for the ride, trying to tire it out.

45 minutes later, he started to slow down enough that I was able to pull myself up to him by "pumping" tuna fishing style. With each pump, I essentially pulled my kayak through the water to the spot where the fish was hunkered down "sulking". I pulled the dead weight up through the water until my egg sinker showed below the surface. I leaned over to see what it was and saw the tip of a thresher's tail break the surface of the water - he was tail hooked!

As soon as the tail broke the surface, he took off again, peeling off maybe 100 yds of line in a single long horizontal run. I shouted for Andy to come in and back me up. I also decided at that point that it was big enough to be a keeper, and this was going to be a battle to the end.

Andy paddled up and I asked him to get a rope ready and to paddle up to me and be ready to rope the tail (thank God he'd brought some rope!). This took another 15 minutes of the shark making runs then me pulling it back up with the rod & reel, with Andy hovering close by. We finally managed to get him between the kayaks and get a rope around the line and then onto his tail. I then tied the rope off to a padeye on the center of my kayak and cut the line from my rod and stowed the it in one of my upright holders. Then I caught my breath and rested my burning arms.

Its amazing how much less leverage you have when doing this on a kayak - you are basically sitting down, at the water level, with nothing to rest your rod against - its all "arms"...

After resting my arms, I handed my long kill knife to Andy and then we put our paddles across each other's kayaks to create a stable working platform. Then I hauled the writhing shark up by the tail (he had started to recover) and tried to get him up onto my lap. He did NOT want to come nicely, and kept twisting and arching his back, which is quite a circus act on a kayak with another guy hovering close by with a 9" razor sharp knife!

The thresher almost grazed one of Andy's bare knees while he arched back and forth. He dropped his head down and I quickly pulled Andy over to me with my left leg that I had braced on the foredeck his kayak. Andy reached over and quickly slashed the gills on one side. I then let the shark drop back into the water, turned him over and repeated the same process with his other side, which took another 10 minutes of thrashing around.

Soon we were surrounded by a huge cloud of blood in the water. Wouldn't you know it had been "shark week" and apparently Andy had been watching it every night, so he wanted to get moving once we saw that blood cloud... ;-)

I hung the shark in the water for a few minutes and let it bleed out a bit. Then with Andy's help was able to haul it up onto my kayak in between my legs, with the tail going up under my right armpit and its nose on my fore deck. We paddled about 1/2 way back to the beach and then the shark had finally stopped moving around much, so I decided to stop and gut it out on the water rather than waiting until we were on shore. Of course at this point, my entire kayak was filled with blood soup, and I was sitting in 3" of blood and sea water.

I rolled the shark up onto one side and Andy pulled up next to me and slit the shark's belly. We pulled out the liver and guts (checking the stomach, but the contents were all soupy) and then re-secured the shark to the yak and made the paddle back in.

We got mobbed by people when we came up to the beach. Luckily we snapped a few pictures.

It seems like every time I get a thresher, I'm not looking for one, and when I go looking for them, I never get one... Fishing still amazes me the longer I do it - I don't think any "rules" ever actually apply; its what ever Nature has in store for you that day...

-Brent

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The kayak is a 15' Cobra Tourer, by the way. As a friend of mine described it once, its "like fishing from a unicycle"...

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http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s.../untitled4.jpg

nice catch

Great fish tale! :luxhello:

The funny part is that when I first paddled out, I considered going back to my truck and switching out to spearfishing gear and free-diving because the visibility looked really good. Glad I was too lazy and just stuck with fishing. :D

awesome write up, bravo!

I got to live every second of it!! :luxhello:

Beautiful fish. Great size, one of those that all neigbors score from :cheers1:

Yup - all the neighbors are eating well. I sent out a lot of text messages on the ride home with the cooler full.

I was blessed with luck; I guess my payback is that I STILL haven't found a halibut or a legal WSB yet this year... (though it feels like summer is just around the corner, since the water temps are still 59-62 degrees here...)

Nice catch! One of these days... Also, nice play by play story, good read. :luxhello:

Thanks for the tutorial!! :luxhello:

Great Read! Congrats on the fsh, and for having 5 of these- :luxhello: in only 7 replies. Thats gotta be some sort of new record :cheers1:

By-catch can be really fun. Great report.

Great story, looks like El Cap?

Was up in that area this week and hit goleta beach for halibut. Definitely not August conditions, water was dirty and almost un-fishable.

Close. :-) Before anyone who'd figured out the location gets too excited, I talked to one of the lifeguards there after coming in with the T, and he said he'd been guarding there every summer since 1984 and had NEVER seen anyone come in with a thresher before. In fact, he said "most people come back with nothing at all" (that is a direct quote). Its why I don't fish the spot too often unless I'm willing to paddle a couple miles up the coast; its usually not all that fishy for me.

Yea, Summer has definitely not arrived yet in Santa Barbara! I spearfished a bit on Wednesday morning (got a 30" ling cod) and the water was 57 degrees! Starting to clear up a bit, though.

Still not seeing many big schools of pacific mackerel, which usually start showing up this time of year when the water warms up a bit. Lots of 'dines though.

Good job!