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Left GE at 3:00 on Friday headed for the Lindy with my brother Robert and two friends from church, Doug Long, (former long line Captain) and his grown son Paul.
Picked up 2 dolphin before dark then located bait just as we were bringing in the lines. So we ran into the wind to start our night drift over the bait. Didn't get our first mako until after midnight, released this one hoping for a larger fish. Larger Mako shows up withing ten minutes of the release, this is a nicer fish, so he takes 3 shots to the head with a 22. Seams to bleed out and die quickly, so with the gaff firmly planted I drag him around to the door and we pull him in. I get started resetting lines, my brother starts to try and retrieve the circle hook, but he is gut hooked deep. So he completely guts this shark and cleans up the cockpit. Ten minutes go by, while I am still setting lines and I hear all this racket behind me, this shark is now going nuts, I jump on the gunnel, my brother jumps on the outboards and the two other guys are on the seats. All of us watching this shark jump and bite its way from one side of the cockpit to the other, and all I can see is his open gut cavity with nothing in it. This goes on for 15 seconds, which seemed a lot longer, and I am thinking are you kidding me??? While I am watching this shark flip all over the place with no guts. Now the shark calms down, and all of us are like, "did that really just happen"? How is that possible? I have killed my share of animals in my life, both hunting and fishing, but have never seen anything like that.
Caught and release another Mako at around 4:00 am.
Up on the troll in the morning deployed a mixture of skirted and naked bally's with Sterling Tackle spreader bars and a Bob Schnieder chugger on the short rigger. Had another mahi and a double on yellowfin(50-70#) by 7:00am. Had another double on longfin, but pulled the hook on one. All four tuna took the same two bars, Sterling Tackle 9" floating squid bars (rainbow and zucchini) with cedar plug stingers. We found all our fish in 200 to 400 fathoms, but there were a lot of boats working inside, some caught and some didn't. As we trolled toward home we had a white pop the Bob Schnieder chugger out of the clip, so I dropped it back and he took another swat, he then proceded to knock the rainbow bar out of the outside rigger and then come up and took a shot at the flatline ballyhoo. Still nothing coming tight, as my brother pitches a naked bally to him. He then comes back to the chugger in my hand and I can feel it coming tight this time, only to last 5 seconds as his first jump is almost a complete flip and a violent head shake. Oh well, that would have been cool to catch one. Had one more mystery bite, which was a nice fish on our wwwwb heavy blue/ white with ballyhoo.
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