How to land a halibut

[Whizz Bang]

Okay, I love threads like this. When I first got started with this little addiction of ours, I stumbled across a BIG fish and unknowingly pissed off more than a few guys with that new guy luck. My first post on BWE was of a 41lb butt. The first fish I had ever had to gaff myself and the second fish I had ever caught on my kayak.

Here is an excerpt from that post(I was fishing a sardine on a c rig)..."In 55ft of water my clicker made a little noise, and again I thought that the kelp fairy had visited me and my little buddy. The clicker made some more noise, this time in a decidedly unkelpish manner. I stared at my rod dumbfounded. What do I do? What is happening? What is down there, and why is it messing with me? With growing fear I pulled my rod from its holder and as the line again loaded with the weight of some surely hideous leviathon, I swung and the rod bent. Idiot! Now what?

I vaguely remembered something about reeling, maybe keep some pressure on it. The fight was all vertical with a little back and forth, when I saw color, I realized this was gonna be a bit of baptism by fire. Every article about catching halibut from a kayak that I have read, stresses the difficulty and danger. Gents, this was only my second fish on this boat, the other being a foolish 14 inch calico. I prepped my gaff, and game clip and cleared my deck, all the while praying to an assorted pantheon of lower gods, and trying to keep pressure on the butt while he was doing his head shake thing. He freaked out on me three times and on the third time up, I sunk the gaff.

Somewhere between seeing color and sinking the gaff, my forebrain shut down. This was evident after I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get the game clip through gills and out mouth instead of in mouth and out through gills. Twice he almost pulled me in, and I must have hit him with the billy club about a hundred times in between using my gaff to rip at his gills and soft vitals. At one point I made the very dumb move of trying to stab him in the head, and as the knife slid across his armored skull, he grinned and laughed. It was a dark laugh, an evil laugh, a graveyard laugh. My bladder loosened, and the world swam before my eyes. This was it, he was gonna win. He was gonna take me down there with him to stay, forever and ever with all the little fishees.

My thoughts turned to my wife and family. What were they going to do without me? I had to live! With new found resolve, I rallied, and the rest became a blur. From the little I remember, there was a lot of screaming and flailing about. There was certainly alot of splashing. At one point I believe there may have even been a small fire. Some kindly passerby must have motored over and put it out."

Anyways, that is the way I remember it.