I returned from New Caledonia after a five day live-aboard charter yesterday. This was a trip that has been about a year in the planning as Tak Otsuka and I been very keen to take Kenji Konishi, the owner of Carpenter on a trip to the land of monsters GTs. Also, while I have fished the south extensively, I have minimal experience in the north so all in all, this was a trip we have looked forward to with a lot of anticipation.
Kenji turned up for the trip armed to the teeth with his current new range of rods as well as a number of prototype sticks. The same applied for lures - while he had his traditional favorites, he also had a few new prototypes he was testing out. As Carpenter will be rolling out the release of its new rods soon (we've already seen small numbers of rods like the Monster Hunter 80H released), I'll also put up a review of my views on these rods in a separate thread soon as I know a lot of you are looking at these with quite a bit of anticipation. For the purposes of the trip report, I won't go into the rods.
New Caledonia obviously loves great anglers because it rolled out good weather for Kenji, unlike what it has done for myself and Malcolm on some of our trips in the past! The rest of it, well, Kenji made his own luck. I've been in this sport long enough and of course, have fished previously with Kenji so I didn't have stars in my eyes but he truly is an angler in a different class to myself. His skill with the surface stickbait is breathtaking. For those of you who have attempted to swim a Gamma in the past, you simply cannot believe what he can do with a surface stickbait. The lure simply seems to come alive and what he can do with a huge Gamma stickbait is amazing. The fish think so too because they simply kill it.
Kenji doesn't like going into the size game without a scale to weigh the catches as he is very conservative so they're my estimates of size but he ended the trip with the following captures - 1 x 55kg+, 1 x 50kg, 1 x 45kg+, a stack of 30-40kg and to put the icing on the cake, a big dogtooth around 50kgs on a massive 250 Gamma. Highlights were of course the big fish but believe it or not, a dogtooth on epic proportions attempted to eat the 50kg dogtooth he caught whole. He had the fight won when he said something funny was happening and most of the fight went out of the fish. He reeled it it for us to find the familiar triangular bite mark of another dogtooth around the middle of the fish. I can't even imagine how big the second doggie must have been.
The other highlight which Tak and I are still laughing about was that one night, a small bird got into the Antares. Rudy woke up as he heard it hopping along the floor and he tried to catch it but it evaded him and hopped into Kenji's cabin. Kenji was in a deep sleep when the bird started hopping up his body starting from his feet. He didn't have his glasses on so couldn't see what it was but he was extremely startled by the bird as his first thought was it was a big rat. This incident gave Tak and myself enormous pleasure and unfortunately, for Kenji, he has been copping it about the killer tori (Japanese for bird) since then.
Overall, an unbelievable trip - thanks an absolute heap to David and Rudy at Le Poisson Banane for making it possible and for working so hard every day.
PS - Tak and I made good spectators!
