Knife to a Gun Fight

**French** · 03-15-2010 12:41 PM

So, I still had a bit of a bug after missing the hot bluefin bite last time I was down. I just spent a week in Atlanta working 7 straight 15 hour days at HIMSS10, with my nights spent drafting HIMSS Public Comments to a HHS proposed regulation on certification of electronic health records. Exciting stuff eh?

I had two days of comp time due, so I put out feelers with some boats about doing a makeup on Wednesday, when the weather was supposed to be nice (2-4ft seas). Captain Jason Norton of The Ranger, an Ocean City boat wintering at Oden's Dock in Hatteras offered me a spot with a party of 3 at a good price, so I bit. Jason was very communicative in planning the trip, which was a huge stress relief.

I left Falls Church around 7pm and made a few stops on the way down. I arrived at Odens at 1:30am and slept in my car until 5:30am. Captain Jason had the boat ready to rock and roll when the other 3 folks, who drove down from Berlin MD, arrived. One was another charter captain who was going to play the mate for the day.

We headed out to our first mark with such a smooth ride that I fell asleep. I also slept through our first troll but I drew #4 in a rousing game of paper rock scissors. We didn't see marks, and Jason moved us quickly to 100 fathoms, where I woke up and we started marking fish.

We found a nice rip that made things much more choppy. We got a big hookup right after Jason yelled about a nice mark. This fish didn't not want to come in. After a 50 minute battle where I spent most of the time adjusting the chair, we stuck the gaff in a wide shouldered 141lb 64 inch bluefin. We then hooked another one with a quicker release. I am a master of turning the chair, and little else.

We had another lull, and I started getting a little green. I stayed outside because we were marking fish, but I was not feeling great. Finally we got smoking run number 2 on a 130w and we put number 2 in the chair, and then sure enough, the only 50W in the spread gets annihilated. FML. Can you say knife to a gunfight? Especially with #2 in the chair. I threw on the belt and prayed.

The fish made a smoking run and got me down to 5 wraps around the spool. I rammed the rod down into the gunnell and started cranking as hard as I could. We backed down and got about 75 yards of line and then I put the drag up to the pin and just held on until they landed and released the second fish. I was dizzy, throwing up, and just trying to hold on to the rod.

Finally, I got in the chair and put on the seat harness, which helped my burning arms. We backed down on the fish and got most of the line back, but the rod and reel just didn't have the power to really crank down. I went past the pin to 3/4 drag and handlined line to the spool as I cranked. The other captain from OCMD also helped handline when the fish would stop running. After an hour we finally got the fish up beside the boat. We made a couple of marks to get the length and had a choice to make. The beast was 74 inches and would fill the boat's trophy tag, but the Captain said they'd prefer to use the tag in tournaments. I was fine with that and made the call to release the fish. We revived it and it swam off. What a battle!

It was now 1pm, and we could hear that most of the boats were on fish, but I think everyone was shot. We went looking for AJ's and Blackfins on jigs, but didn't find any. We called it a day, split up the meat, and I headed back up the coast to the KDH Comfort Inn. 2pm checkout! Whooo!

Apparently some crazy folks hauled kayaks out and landed a 66 incher as well. There is a fine line between crazy and insane. That may have been insane.