The night before I had another tuna dream. I guess it counts as another caught fish even if it was only subconscious fantasy. The usual dreams I have at this time of year are of the hunting variety. You know, the ones where you never really kill one, but are always on the “quest”. You can either see the deer on the other side of the property but you cant quite get to them, or you are setting up a stand site for the ‘big one” that you just know is using the area. Anyway, this is what brought it on.I had recently watched a “Monster Fish” show on TV where some celebrity “sportsman” was up in Nova Scotia on a commercial boat for 9 days trying to hook up to one of the giant tuna that are really big up there. An 800-900 pound fish is common there. The boat he was fishing on was nice and it was obvious to me that the captain knew what he was doing by the gear and methods he was using. But there seemed to be a problem, the rod wasn’t really bending when the celebrity was shown fighting the “huge” fish. The camera mounted on the rod, pointing down towards the angler and the reel showed a tangled line with cross winding and bunched up line on one side of the reel. If you have a 900 pound tuna on the rod, you aint mounting no camera on the rod blank !!! Sure enough, at the end of the show, when the fish was actually shown on camera, with the celeb angler standing right next and patting the fish, it looked to be just over the minimum legal size at only about 275 pounds ! It pretty much explained to me how the angler could have gotten away with so many mistakes. During the filming they also showed a big fish in the over 800 class alongside, being “swum” after the catch, and being hoisted at the dock and I wondered if the captain ever let that “sportsman” ever touch the rod during the battle ? So, since I felt I watched a fantasy show, I wanted to share my own fantasy fish story with you guys.
What I remember was that a bunch of folks were on the boat and we were idling out of a river or estuary, similar to The River out of Meetinghouse Pond into Pleasant Bay in Orleans. I don’t even think we were fishing, but I looked over the side and saw a HUGE tuna swimming alongside of the boat at the same speed as us. This fish was 12 feet long ! In fact he was slowly over taking us, but only about 5 feet out on the port side. Knowing that the harpoon was rigged on the bow of the boat I ran to the bow and tried to tie the harpoon onto the buoy line in time. As the fish passed by, I thrust the lily (point) into the fish and he took off, peeling the buoy line out of the basket. Knowing the fish was big, and looking for more flotation, I grabbed at anything to add to the two small buoys on the end of the line. All I could come up with was the circular life ring, so I tied it on just in time for the buoys and ring to go flying over the rail and waking through the water after the fleeing fish.
Then I woke up.
Capt Bruce & Marilyn S
Send me an email if you want to see what a bent rod looks like with a real giant on the end of it.
