If you're not a fan of LL Cool J, that title will sound pretty stupid.
I headed over to New Cal in early July, and fished the area around Poindimie on the north east side of the island. Perfect weather greeted us and we had glassy conditions for most of our time up there. Infact a bit of breeze would have been most welcome..
Day 1 saw us working a stretch of reef eagerly chasing GT's. I should say that the excitement of fishing an area that you know holds big mean GT's can be quite distracting. It took me a little while to get into my rhythm and settle the nerves and not burn it up as wasted energy..
Rigging up, I went straight for an Ebipop 140 while Rob my fishing companion went with the skippers advise on a stickbait. As I hammering away on big poppers, Rob proceeded to get his first GT, then a 2nd, and a 3rd GT (a monster 52kg fish
) before I got a touch (not counting a shark which broke my Ebipop!) I changed lures to match him and within 4 casts had a GT pup around 10kg. Then I got a big side on out of the water strike which is still etched in my memory.. Result being a 35-40kg fish, again on the hero of the day stickbait.. At the end of day 1 we returned to the resort with 6 GT's up to 52kg taken, all on River2sea Rover 230 stickbaits.
One GT was sharked, the result can be seen here in the vid
Sadly there were some sharks around!!
That was the best GT day of the trip, (and I've ever had) as far as quality fish go. Etienne the skipper was a legend and his knowledge and advise was always on the money. The Illex rods onboard are superb. We did have one day which was pretty slow, but we did well considering it was supposedly off season, I think we got 20 species in all. Bycatch included coral trout, jobfish, sharks, spaniards. The jigging was good and we didn't do enough of it till the last day, lost a
lot of jigs, a few from smokings very doggie like. Definitely keen to head back when the cow YFT and mahi mahi are around. I took a lot of my kingfish jigs but the shorter jigs were getting the most action, so I ran out of them first..
It's a huge area from Pondimie to Touho and Hienghene with plenty of fishy looking areas on the charts and sounder, the water visability was so clear. One day we were having a quick bite and someone dropped some penne pasta overboard. We could see our pasta which we were having for lunch drift down to the depths only to attract big wahoo, mack tuna, spaniards and sharks. I dropped a jig down and saw a nice wahoo take it but unfortunately missed the fish. I took the jig off and baited up with some coral trout we'd caught and instantly got a nice mack tuna, he was full of the pasta we'd had for lunch.. It was kind of like that footage of the Nomad Spanish Fly video. I'll try and add some photos later, here is the video.
Cheers Dave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEmHYdQz9OI#noexternalembed
