LJ Halibut

[Whizz Bang]

Anyone who has been fishing LJ with any regularity recently, has probably seen me. Sand colored wilderness systems ride, and a brown pathfinder (I feel silly calling it granite). I am new to Kayak fishing, and have only had my kayak for a few weeks. In that time, however, I have managed to get out to LJ about a dozen times. I have spent untold hours online (wasting taxpayer dollars) surfing a handful of kayak fishing sites like this one and reading and rereading articles on how to catch this or that from your yak. I have been focusing on YT and have seen beautiful fish taken near me on several occasions while I was paying my dues.
Friday was a little off, in that the area I was focusing on (which had been bait heavy for the last week) was absolutely dead. I caught one sorry mack and dragged him around for a couple of hours, until I finally passed over a little more bait. I dropped the sabiki and caught a single solitary sardine. Pathetic. I replaced the mack with the dine and proceeded to drag him on a tour of LJ. After an hour and a half of that, both I and the dine had had it. I pulled the little feller off of my flyline and threw him on a carolina rig, down he went mumbling something about overtime and unfair practices. Another hour passed of slow trolling/drifting different depths. In 55ft of water my clicker made a little 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.
When it was all said and done, I took it by Ric’s OEX Kearny store to get it weighed. I bought my kayak from Ric. He talked me through the process and offered his valuable insight, and for that I am grateful. Thank you Ric.
41lb. That is what the halibut weighed. This is not a record, many guys I’m sure have caught bigger, only a few days prior, Josh Pruitt had been telling me about a 50 pounder he had just landed. But I am not Josh, and last Friday I got my first California Halibut from a Kayak. Last Friday I got my first successful paddle back with a kayak that wallowed in the swells, worrying all the while that what was lying across my lap would wake up again. Last Friday, I gotta tell you guys, I felt good, real good. And today I got to put in my first post. Hello everyone, it is a special thing we share.
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