Fishing, a steep (and expensive) learning curve

I think the grand total was a loss of one fishing rod, one fishing rod holder, 5 big squidy lures, a few hooks, some weights, a bucket (that was actually lost in trying to clean up post-catch)… Hence the expensive part of the learning curve, but luckily we finally came out on the top of that curve and now are fishing masters using nothing but a snub line (thank you to Gilles who helped us make one that was functional, and The Cruisers’ Guide to Fishing). One of the things in that learning curve is that apparently 20lb line is not so good for ocean fishing, that’ll snap in a heartbeat. Once we jumped up to 200lb line, then we were talking! Think we could have drug a blue whale behind us with that stuff and still been alright.

The loss of the rod and holder (lures, weights and hooks attached of course) was one of the more comically tragic of the losses- setting off from Panama City, less than an hour under our belts with the sun in our hair we hopefully put the line into the water. Our hopes were actually not so high considering our amazing lack of luck the entire time aboard Cinnabar, but still we had fingers crossed. Amazingly enough, within 5 minutes we had a huge mahi mahi! Sounds exciting, right? Well, the mahi mahi actually being attached to our boat lasted about .5 seconds as the strain tore the whole rigging right off. Mahi mahi jumping in the sunlight in all its glory, trailing a fishing rod behind. Not off to a good start, it was the fishing rod’s inaugural try.

By the end with our handline we hauled in a 60lb mahi mahi, the grand triumph and the event that probably marked the end of my fishing career, figure I can’t do much better than that. A week later and many people having been fed by that fish, we’re actually finishing off that fish tonight for another scrumptious dinner Onno is preparing, so I better get off the computer before they go and eat it all.