i had never managed to find anyone I knew well enough to feel comfortable asking whether I could go out fishing with them. But at the end of the Latham fishing competition I had met and got to know a woman with a boat and she was willing to take me.
My only experience of fishing up until that point was as a child fishing in the small brook where we lived so this trip to the open ocean with the opportunity to catch mammoth fish was very exciting. And even better, the boat boys would do the nasty stuff like put the bait on the hook and take the fish off the hooks.
We headed out ito the channel dragging lures from 6 lines behind the boat. It was a few hours before one of the lines screamed and we had caught something. One of the boat boys strapped a special waste belt onto me onto which i placed the end of the rod and slowly I drew the beast towards me.
As it grew closer we were all peering to see what it was, which fish, what colour. I was just hoping it stayed on the line and that it didn’t escape at the last minute. And as it came closer to the boat I could see flashes of yellow and bright blue – a dorado!
And it was big – about 7-8kg. The boys stuck a spear into it and hauled it aboard where it flapped around for a while until it gasped it’s last breath. I didn’t like that bit. But when it was almost still, they slung it into a compartment in the deck of the boat where it stayed until later when the trainee boat boy took it out to gut and de-scale it.
The boat was equipped with a fish finder device which uses sonar to locate shoals of fish. You can also see the depth of water, the shape of the sea bed and temperature changes. It costs a small fortune but what a difference it must make. Al around us we could see small wooden local fishing boats with one or two men sailors on board. They don’t have such equipment but they still manage to catch enough to make a living.
We didn’t catch another large fish but we went in search of red snapper by using electric fishing rods and fishing on the sea bed. We managed to catch about 8 and later that night, we cooed them and ate them. What a wonderful way to spend a Sunday. Let’s hope there’s many more Sundays like that to come.