50 Pound Fish - For Breakfast!
10 May 2013 | Marqueses Passage
I woke up this morning to the sound of the fishing line running out. Zack came screaming past yelling "fish on!" So, I got up. Zack had been up for a while and had decided to make his own lure. He took two lures and combined parts of them and then added a mardi gras bead at the top. Well, it was an effective piece of fishing bait. He had it out for almost half an hour and we had a huge fish on. David had to bring it in because it was just too heavy for Zack to reel in. They had to fight it for over half an hour to wear it out enough to get it in. Finally David got it over the transom and we pulled out our fish identification book. Zack looked it up and discovered that we had a Short-billed Spearfish on board. The food quality only rated as good, we should have thrown it back but Zack was just too exited to have caught such a large fish on his first home made lure that we had to keep it. He was just as big as Goliath the 50 pound Wahoo we caught off of Columbia. He wouldn't fit in the fish bucket and David had to lay him across the floor of the cockpit to clean him. What a bloody mess that was. Thankfully that is David's job and all I had to do was bag and freeze the fillets. Zack was thrilled and so I cooked fish for breakfast. Unfortunately Zack wasn't all that keen on the Spearfish and said it was tasteless. I am going to have to try to make some fish spread of something out of it. I guess we will end up bringing it to many future potlucks. We put Zack's new lure back out and a few hours later we got a 2 1/2 foot Mahi-Mahi. This is Zack's favorite, so we kept that too. We are trying to fill up the freezer because food is expensive in the Pacific islands.
David's mom wrote that she was concerned that we were alone out here.. Not so. We are of course traveling with our buddy boat Sueno. Galavanter, a boat we were hanging out with in the Galapagos went down to the Gambiers instead of coming with us to the Marquesas. We also have a cruiser's net going, which is a group of boats that left within a week of each other from the Galapagos. We check in to the net every morning and every evening. There are so many boats in the net that it takes an hour for all of them to check in. We know most of the boats, it becomes a big community of cruisers out here, so don't worry because we are never alone.
We are about 350 miles from Fatu Hiva and we will hopefully be making landfall in a couple of days. I think we are all ready to get off the boat, this has been a long time at sea - today is day 19 since leaving Galapagos. Hopefully our friends on MacPelican will still be in Fatu Hiva when we arrive. I am going to cook some fish!