Swordin 101!

[SeaBiscuit]

Ark,

Hannaman, I am sorry that you Blew a Seal, I am especially sorry that we had to hear about it.

Amen.

Now Deep, tell us a bit about using live bait (hardtails & macks) in addition to squid and light stick on one rig when swording. I read that this is the ultimate sword presentation, because it "pleases" all of the swords killing senses. The light to see. The live bait to hear and feel and the squid to smell and taste.
Do you ever go this way?
Nick

[Deep C]

Now now boys lets put er back on track here....
Sea Biscuit
I was for a while working extensively with runners and macks with mixed results. Bottom line is that they did not produce better than the squids at least for me. I did notice that they drew more unwanted attention from sharks but that could have just been coincidence. Where the worst problem with thme came was them swimming around outher lines. This can be somewhat alleviated by usung jugs or balloons to seperate the spread a bit more than usual but there was enough of an issue there that I don't use them as heavily. Another drawback was that since drop back is virtually eliminated it was tough to get them to swallow deep enough to work as well as I would like.
Now something I do love is to set one out on my top line and if we get tinkers in the lights and catch a few I will almost always splash one.Since that one is free swimming with no weight drop back can be done with ease and it has a high hook up %.

I saw another question I missed about moon... I don't have favorite as such as we seem to get them on all phases. They do act differently on the phases though. For example this last trip was basically on the dark of the moon. The bite stared later than other nights with more moon. Also once we got in the fish the bites seemed to be higher than other nights. The bite lasted longer too... Now of course unless you are out there a whole bunch you really can't dial in stuff like that to a near science. I only get out enough to make very basic generalizations but perhaps Mr. Hannaman could offer up his input...

[Hannaman]

First of all I appologize to you Mr. Trudge, It was the guys after you later that week. I thought you were attacking me so sorry about that...I bait fish with 8 pound test and I didnt think it was a problem since it was so thin and I just kept rigging. Little did I know thin line is your worst enemy and can find its way through your seal in no time, letting water get in the oil and in a short time and in this case the next day it was shot.

Theres alot to say about bite times and most are predicted with moon overhead and underfoot times and also Apogee and Perigee phases. Perigee is when the moon is closest to the earth and therefore the currents and tides are at the strongest resulting in a much better bite. If your off the perigee phase just follow the moon overhead and underfoot times. (overhead means 12 oclock position and underfoot means 6 oclock position) You can get these times from sites such as www.primetimes2.com I follow it and it works then again its fishing so you just have to soak your lines and get lucky. I also do my best if the night has high tide anywhere before midnight.

[Deep C]

Bingo... Thats the stuff we are looking for...All of that you care to part with will be soaked up like bacon grease to grits!
I would have to agree that nights with the tide bringing me ever so slighly in produce well... Out going still produces but I don't get the red hot flurries of activity.
I know a load of guys ***** about the west wind and many wont even go on it. I hold that to heart for trolling near shore but have picked a couple out there on it... Especially if it preceeding a front. It seems I get some great action just before a wind starts kicking...
Whats your take on the west death wind idea?

[Hannaman]

West winds make my bones shiver because i've been spanked in it before taking 3-4 hours to make it back to the inside...last month we had a nice night out there with calm winds most of the night and boated a decent 120 fish and then the winds kicked up from the west about 15 knots and blew us off course. We really couldn't drift a good line even with the paratech sea anchor. I figured if we were to get a fish it would be a dum one who will come in the lights. So I put down a Tinker less than 50 feet below and sure enough it got slammed and we couldn't pull him up for nothing with the drag locked down. We put the rod in the rodholder and cranked him up from there as the west wind was howling. It turned out to be a nice Mako who came up with his mouth open ready to jump in the boat if I had gaffed him. I stepped back away from the gunnel and he just turned his mouth a little and clipped the leader. That was my best and only good experience on a west wind.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Hoooeeee! Thought for a bit there that this nice dock was going to break into all-out warfare! Good to see everything back on it's usual, cooperative keel again. I love the main character here, the fish that they call "Elvis" on the Pacific side. I have fished and caught them both day and night since my first ones (plural - we caught three that night - in the Hudson Canyon off Jersey. First try for them, too. It was a blast and I thought it was easy - LOL! I found out about THAT real fast!)

Fished 'em with a guy who I consider a master at the game, Captain Skip Smith of the Madam and the Hooker fame. I learned a huge amount from him, in spite of having fished the swords for about twenty years before fishing with him and the Dunaways. Skip is the real deal and has been for many decades. The beauty of his techniques is that they are simple and logical, the kind of stuff that I like when it comes to any kind of fishing.

Here is just one gem that he taught me. Downsize your squid baits. It used to be and may still be for all I know, pretty difficult to hook - especially mouth hook Elvis with the traditional giant squid baits. You usually had to fiddle and diddle and mess around with a biter until he either got snagged or you finally managed to get a hook in his mouth. When I commented on the small squids that he was using he explained that swords go for big squids, but when they do they chop them up into pieces and then swim around picking up the pieces. In the process a lot of them wind up picking up the leader, complete with a now-bare or mostly bare hook on it on that long, flat sword of theirs or those non-retractable fins, swim the hook tight and get stuck somewhere in that soft body of theirs. This is super bad news because of their soft flesh. The hook often pulls when this happens and that usually happens toward the end, when the fish is close, you have invested a lot of bite time in him and the mono stretch is maxed out.

To this day a lot of fishermen attribute pulled hooks to soft swordfish mouths. The mouths are a lot tougher than most think, especially if you are using the right hook. The flesh? Full blown sissy meat! Of course, unless you've seen the fish you have no way of knowing where you pulled the hook from, and most fishermen wrongly figure that it's the mouth. (I honk on Elvis right from the giddyup. If I am going to pull a hook, I want to do it early-on, when they are biting so I can maybe get another shot.)

As an aside, we have a special way that we fight daytime fish that we know that we have snagged and night units that we think that we have that have that almost eliminates losing them. Too much to go into here.)

Skip's smaller squid virtually eliminated the hacking thing that caused us to miss fish and to snag way too many of them. What amazed me was that I had fished them for so long and hadn't figured that out for myself, especially since I had dug through the stomach contents of more than a couple of hundred swordfish and had seen for myself the chopped-up giant squid parts AND the many smaller squids (including some truly tiny ones in the bellies of some big swordfish - same thing with fin bait, too) that they had eaten whole. I was already smacking myself in the forehead and saying, "Stunad!" as Skip said, "Big squid or little one, put it in front of a hungry swordfish and he's going to eat it, the difference being that he will just suck down that small one, but he will chop up a giant almost every time." And man, was he right! And dang it, I shoulda known!

Deep C wrote something that has made my blood boil for many decades now when he mentioned ones that come up and start jumping out there in the night. Man, talk about exciting! If there's no moon, all you can do is hear him crashing around out there and if he is close and is a big unit you are going to wind up with your hair standing on end. If it's a full moon (my favorite) you will get to see the beast do her dance and Lordy, Lordy, you will never forget the sight! My biggest Elvis ever, a 516 pounder (market dressed) was just such a fish. She came up and jumped four times in one sequence and then came back up and jumped twice more before we killed her. We saw every jump.

Here she is, or at least my drawing that I did in her honor. When I look at it I can hear her crashing back and I can see that green light lighting up her side. Yeah, yeah, keep it friendly boys when you talk about these great warriors!

Oh, yeah; I wrote two books on swordfishing, one on day fishing and one on night fishing. My favorite? No question - daytime. Hunting them down and baiting them up top is enough to ruin a man...Purple Fever! Thank you, Lord!

[Deep C]

It was Skip that got me turned on to the swords back in the late seventies. His techniques were well known around Miami and I took some basic "101" type knowledge back down to Islamorada and Ocean Reef with me. Ocean Reef guys being closer to Miami were fairly quick to give it a go. The Islamorada boys were slow to jump on anything outside of tradional trolling, schoolie slaying, or kingfishing...
Prior to then I had darted one, caught one old style daytime baiting and taken one at night all near the Hudson. I really enjoyed the night hunts. I even employed the same tactics a few places in the islands though with limited success...
The bite slowed in the early to mid eighties and by 86 it was basically over with the long lines beating it so bad. I did catch one on the troll in 1992 but to this day still consider that a freak.
I guess it was 2001 before I started dabbling back in it. 2002 we caught a couple. 2003 saw rapid improvement to where it was pretty regular to score. 2004 it was most of the time. Almost all of 2005 and 2006 trips produced... One night the drift was just too fast and even 32 ounce baits were litterally trolling and another we were 0-6 for various reasons...
Fred, the small baits are pretty much the norm. 14" is plenty... Those days of the humboldt beast baits have come and gone...

[Hannaman]

Great to hear you chime in Captain Archer. Last year or so we had a good discussion on the other Swordfish forum and we discussed long leaders. I know it could be potentially dangerous but its what I catch every big fish on for the past couple years and wouldnt change a thing. 1 note is when im leadering I don't take wraps I grab the leader and bend my wrist and keep pulling hand over hand with steady pressure, whatever he comes foward with, if he starts to be stubborn I slowly let go. I keep it delicate on the wire compared to the wiring marlin guys do. Oh yea...long live Elvis

[Sea Draggin]

First of all I appologize to you Mr. Trudge, It was the guys after you later that week. I thought you were attacking me so sorry about that...I bait fish with 8 pound test and I didnt think it was a problem since it was so thin and I just kept rigging. Little did I know thin line is your worst enemy and can find its way through your seal in no time, letting water get in the oil and in a short time and in this case the next day it was shot.

How does someone who charters and fishes 3 days a week NOT know what line will do to prop seals??????????????? I gotta tella you, I'm like What The F---!

Two times last year I climbed into the ocean, removed one my props, checked for any line on the shaft after encounters with line(both on dolphins I think). Thats right down to the bathing suit and into the deep blue with a prop wrench, because I didn't want to drive home with line on my shaft. I don't have time to get it fixed. Don't have money to get it fixed.

It wasn't my parties fault, it just happens. With THEIR safety in mind over anything else, I jumped in a took care of business.

The lesson here is to always grease your prop shaft every time you change your lower unit oil, you never know when and where your going to have to pull that thing off. And always keep a spare prop nut.

Boating 101

Deep, please take me fishing!

[Hannaman]

Actually because it never happened before...and thats Swording 2-3 times a week and on the reef another 3-5 times a week. I keep good control over my vessel and its hard work my friend.
I wanna fish with Deep C also, I need a break.

Nice lures Sea Draggin