Friday 9/22 and Saturday 9/23 PE sword reports

[Momentum]

Friday, I headed out with CubanPuerto, sundancekid, and fishingchick on the 34 Fountain. Got set up a little late in rougher seas than predicted but who cares...we still made 40 mph out there in a sloppy 2-4.

Anyways, we only had one shot and never got tight so we totaled 0/1 that night. VERY slow.

On Saturday, I was to take the Momentum for her maiden sword voyage but the port ignition switch was toast so we dropped the SuperDolph in and took that instead (Momentum it is next time!). Anyhow, we wished we had a 32 ft. boat last night instead of a 25' but it worked fine! We headed out into a real sloppy 2-4 again and it took an hour to get out. Finally, we got set up and we already get the first bait back slashed. Not long after, we have the 250' balloon out and Ernie feels the line shuddering for some reason and the rod tip bouncing a little bit. I take a look and feel the rod/line like the fish is trying to slash the bait but was missing it and nailing the line. The bait came back slashed once at the head. Not too long after, the International 50tw rod doubles over (250' bait) and screams off drag like a freight train for 15 seconds, then stops. SuperDolph started to fight the fish and it swam back to the boat not once, but twice. It made another run and swam back again. That time, he shook the hook out. The squid came back perfect so I think the fish inhaled the bait and got hooked in the corner of the mouth with the squid hanging out. We then got the spread back in order and decided to bridle up a runner for the depths. Since we were getting our hits in 250, I dropped the runner down deep. We waited another 30 minutes (radio is DEAD silent) and I had the drag very light so we could hear anything fishy. Finally, I hear...click....click, click....click, click, click....Ernie gets up to check it and to mess around with us he pulls a little bit of drag but realizes there's a fish on the other end regardless! The drag runs off like crazy on the TLD 50 with a good amount of drag and we finally think that we've got our nice swordfish on. The fish stayed deep for the entire fight and we ended up doing circles around him with the boat to keep him in a good position. Finally, after an hour's fight, Ernie is exhausted, and the lead comes up which I break off. Ernie reels up the windon to the snap swivel and light. 15 more feet to go and I'm on the leader. I wire the fish up from straight underneath the boat and....where's the bill?

It was a huge 150-200 lb. shark.

Took an hour to make it home because the waves were so tightly packed together, bow stuffing was almost inevitable with a boat that runs very flat.

We're getting closer to our kill shot! At least we had everything go right as far as line clearing, boat handling, dart loading, and wiring.

Thankfully Ernie made short work of this fish.

[Shark Tagger]

sounds like some action on sat night..nice report.


We didnt make it out.. doing some repairs on teh boat.. should be read next weekend.

[Momentum]

The radio was more quiet Saturday night than Friday night it seemed. I barely heard much of ANYTHING on the radio on Saturday night. Seems like we had some action for how slow it was.