Sitges

An early start this morning granted me some really scenic views…

My real interest though lied further offshore, around five miles out, in 100M water where I soon found the small shoals of BFT I was looking for…

Thinking back, I guess I hooked up around 09:00, on my usual small Tackle House 135mm popper, initially thought it to be a similar sized fish to what we hooked last week and consequentially looked forward to a quick fight and several more fish across the day.

Soon it was pretty clear that this fish was in a different league, it pulled hard, fast and long and I could not budge if from the depths it was swimming at. I would gain a metre or two of line but he would always take it back, laughing at me, and our dance, to and fro went on for what seemed like ages…

Fishing on your own always makes things doubly hard so as I´ve done before used the pull of the fish and the angle of the rod to steer the boat. At one point I thought I had him beat, locked into a pinwheel – but he somehow broke out of it. At another point he surfaced, maybe weakenning, but it was all meaningless – no matter what I did I just couldn´t get him anywhere near the boat…

Hanging over the side I could see the irridescence of the fish reflecting the suns rays from deep in the sea. So close, but it might as well have been a million miles away…

Time made no sense at all, my phone was in the cabin, I was dehydrated, the sun was blazing down, I needed a drink but all I could do was hang on. At one point I simply had to re-hydrate and confess to putting the rod in the holder and creeping forward with the engine on tick-over, only so as to grab a quick drink. And a moment from the pain…

Then, as always happens, mental badness started to creep in… Subconciously I knew we were getting uncomfortably deep into this fight… I could see my braided line slowly becoming frayed and weakened as it was endlessly brought onto, then pulled off the reel, across itself. Colours wise it was orange, green, purple then the fish, 30M down- orange was looking really bad so all I could do, when I was past it and it was firmly on the spoool, was crank up the drag and try to stay in the green.

More time passed. The fight was relentless. There was no end in sight. Crank up the drag, stay in the green….

And then it eventually happened, I could feel the fish tiring. Every pinwheel was of an increasingly smaller radius, it started to looked closer, just a fraction closer ever circle, then purple line started to slowly creep onto the reel. We were almost there….

At the side of the boat my pre-thought out landing plans caved in to pure necessity, I grabbed the leader with my left hand, dropped the rod, switched the leader to my right hand, grabbed the grippers with my left hand then clamped firmly on the jaws, (luckily) at the first attempt. He was mine…

Unfathomabbly it was now 13:20 and after a +4:00hr fight I stared in awe at my biggest ever Med fish… it´s length, weight, dimensions, size really didn´t matter. It was just HUGE, way beyond those we caught last week

On another day I would have better photos but hopefully the ones I managed help share my memory of an amazing day…