What a great night to be on the swordfish grounds Friday night: the weather seemed to be ideal.
We were rewarded with a nice 57" swordfish around 9:30 p.m., brought in by angler Bajakian, as our first bite for the night.
A similarly sized swordfish came up into the lights with the fish we had on by a belly-meat thread. Our fish was foul hooked in the belly just behind the pectoral fin and Richard kept about strike drag on the fish. We had just cleared the deep tip rod and the flat line but were too slow to pitch another bait to the free swimmer.
Another bite followed about a 1/2 hour later but it quickly went slack, with a newbie angler on the rod that did not keep it tight. You learn and hopefully get better the next go around.
We reset on similarly close numbers about the 26:03 and that successful bottom number. No other bites until we made the call for lines in about 12:45 a.m. The tips were the last ones to come in and we got tight again on the retrieve. The newbie angler did a better job at keeping it tight, but still the line went slack after a minute.
Friday night, all of our fish hit the 125 line and they were all on the tip rods.
Another interesting note: two of us were hanging out on the observation stand and we could hear fish splashing about in the darkness, in the general direction of the balloon lines since it did not seam to be any wave action. We could not see any clues that the balloon were being tampered with: no drag clicks, no balloon movement, and no streaking lights through the water. But when we cleared the green and blue balloon lines, the far two were stripped clean. Something was happening out there but we could not detect it. So we were happy with all the action but it seemed like others could not buy a bight. Did not catch the boat name but someone was talking about 3 for 6 that night.
We had a nice fish iced down in the fish bag along with a small blackfin Tuna: we were all happy with the night's successful trip.
Thanks Cogzwell for the invite to go fishing: we all had a great time and more happy memories on the Hailey Ryan: standing by on 72!