Yellowfin

The Huntriss regulars minus Lee were drifting out wide looking for wahoo. I'd shot a smallish (15kg) spanish on the first drift and no one had seen anything bigger, very dismal.

 

The second drift put us over some gutters and I dived down expecting some dhus to be close by. About half way down I could see some appearing but just thought I'd check beside me incase a wahoo had snuck in. No wahoo, but a school of decent Yellowfin on the edge of vis :)

 

I've seen this many times and they rarely come into range so I didn't pay them much attention and continued down. At this point the school made a sharp right turn and swam straight past me! arrr I love the dumb ones!

 

I pointed at the closest one's nose and let my trusty 1.4m EDGE do the rest. They must have been fairly moving (although it didn't look like it) as the 7mm shaft collected him midships.... Bugger I thought this will take a while....

 

However the spear cracked the spine on the way through and the fish went into a series of high speed circles on the surface, like about 60km/hr circles. I let him tire for a few minutes, remembering the last time I did this and ended up with the spear through my forearm (story for a different day!).

 

Anyway I soon had my hand in his gills, a quick spike to the brain, and it was all over.....

 

That was until I'd gilled and gutted him.... (if you're going to kill it at least look after the eating qualities) A fair size hammerhead showed up intent on lunch.

 

I still didn't have the spear back in the gun so I was just holding the shark off with the barrel and holding onto the tuna. It was quiet amusing as the shark didn't seem to realise I was there, just that for some reason it couldn't get near that tasty snack.

 

Eventually he got really worked up and starting swimming faster and faster till I couldn't swing the gun around to hold him off....

 

I've always found hammerheads hard to take seriously as they look so silly but this guy meant business so I pulled the spear though the fish and gave the shark a decent jab in the belly. This sent him down deep and I was able to get to the boat. I was stoked thinking this would be the fish of the day (yellowfin are a rarely speared fish in WA waters)

 

El presidenta climbed on board, looks at my fish, kind of gives a sigh and jumps back in… literally 2 min later I hear him calling from the water holding up another yellowfin!! FFS, both decent fish, just over 30 kegs but to make it worse his ended up going a kilo heavier than mine.