Small Wind, Big Fish – Day 5 to New Zealand

Well the wind is basically gone. Last night we decided around 2:00 a.m. that the wind was so light we were just banging the gear around and not moving very fast, so we fired up the engine.

When the wind gets light the sails don’t stay full. The rolls from the ocean then start flopping the sails around, backwinding them and causing them to flog. Even though we put a line called preventer on the main sail to stop this slamming it isn’t perfect and the sails take some wear as well as the hardware. Noisy, unpleasant, slow and hard on the gear ? not a great combination.

Combine with with struggling to maintain four knots of boat speed with occasional drops into the two’s and you start accumulating a lot of reasons to start the engine.

This morning the wind filled a little and we flew some sails, but gain four knots was a struggle. We put the spinnaker up and got our boat speed into the sixes but the wind didn’t hold. So we’ve been motoring ever since.

On the other hand the lack of wind and the flattish water at least encourages one to drop a line in. So we did.

In Tahiti we visited a chandlery with a good fishing department and Kathy had me pick out a new lure for one of my birthday presents. Still bemoaning the loss of my Hootchie Troll, we had an extensive discussion with the fellow there (in French) about what we were looking for. Something that would catch Mahi Mahi, and if something with nasty sharp teeth like a Wahoo took it we could still get it in. So he come up with something called, and I am not making this up, a “French Tickler” – a green bullet headed lure with eyes on it and orange and green feathers. The marketing guys that work for fishing tackle companies really need to graduate from middle school.

The price was appalling, but I guess sport fishermen commonly put down money for these types of things. These are custom rigged, the fellow in the shop put it together with a hook, a short steel leader (eat that, Wahoos!) and a longer nylon leader. Its the first lure of this sort that I’d bought but it was a present so why not. Usually I’m too nervous spending big money on fishing lures, having come from a background as a freshwater pond fisherman and a salt water surf caster where lures and gear lost to rocks, snags, trees and broken light tackle are commonplace.

So today we took out the “French Tickler” and rigged it up. It was out for much of the day – nothing. When trolling I typically check the lures from time to time to make sure that they haven’t picked up seaweed or fouled. I re-set the lure and sat down with the family to listen to our current audiobook and work our way through some of the nice French cheeses we must dispose of before we enter New Zealand customs. This is course is when the fish hits – me with a mouthful of bleu cheese sitting back in comfort.

From the I could see it was a big one, it jumped several times flashing a brilliant blue. It was work to haul it in; this Mahi Mahi had to be close to five feet long. It is the first one we’ve caught that has been too big to just lift from the water, I had to hand the pole to Kathy and gaff it to get it in. Then the fun begins!

The back deck of a sailboat is…suboptimal…as a fish cleaning station. You are working on a teak deck, flat on the ground on your knees with the fish. In this case the fish was awkwardly large, one couldn’t easily say, grab the tail if you were kneeling by the head. Too far away.

This particular fish had come in already bleeding too, it had swallowed the lure deeply and between that and the gaff it was a bit messy. “Ew, I got fish blood on me,” Kathy said.

I took a look down at my legs, hands, and shirt and thought about what I felt hit my face as this thing thrashed around coming on board. That’s cute. Turns out some of the blood was mine though, I think I got finned in the struggle or something.

When you bring the beast into the boat you try to subdue it. We’ve read that an ounce of alcohol (vodka) applied to the gills of a fish like this will kill it instantly and subdue it quietly. This is utter bollocks, I’ve dumped half a liter of vodka (watermelon flavored, a gift, which makes the fish cleaning process smell much more weird) straight on to the gills of smaller fish than this one without apparent effect. At least not rapid effect, I think eventually they just die from the abuse. This particular fish was large enough that Kathy was having a hard time holding the tail down while I was trying to get the booze into the gills. The last of the watermelon vodka didn’t work (flop-flop-flop-flop) – GET ME SOMETHING ELSE!. So Kathy came back with a bottle of Absinthe that we’d carried around for a long time and tried on my birthday; no one much cared for it. Well, perhaps if we can’t kill the fish we can at least drive it insane so I grabbed the Absinthe and went all Toulouse Lautrec on it.

Now, when the fish is still flopping I tend to not consider it dead ? and I much prefer to fillet a dead fish over a live one. After the watermelon vodka and the Absinthe, well frankly I’m surprised the fish didn’t barf right there, but it was slowing down. Finally.

So dinner tonight was blackened Mahi Mahi, with enough more into the freezer for two more meals!