Fishing System

Fishing has been our main source of food – we really have yet to break in to any of our stores of frozen vac packed meat from New Zealand. In fact our freezers are more full then when we left courtesy of prolific fishing and two fish that weighted in over 80 pounds combined weight. The fishing has been so good that we are reluctant to put out the rod until we have eaten the prior catch. Ron Lane asked me about our fishing “system” aboard Iron Lady. Pretty straight forward, so here it is.

Circa built me a wonderful rod holder that mounts in the pushpit. It is the perfect height to fight a fish and the surrounding lifelines secure me well when working the fish. We are using a 50 pound class stand up rig – nothing lighter would be acceptable here.

The dink sits just to port on the aft deck and the fish billy club and gaff reside there ready to subdue a critter whether we are fishing from Iron Lady or the dink.

The gaffing area is the swim platform at the stern directly below the rod.

Our standard procedure is for me to fight the fish from the rod holder (a rod holder never lost a fish). Deb cons the boat from the upper helm station keeping the boat aligned with the fish. I wire the fish as the leader comes up and Steve gaffs it from the swim platform. As quickly as possible, we get it up on the back deck and subdue it with the fish billy.

The result today was this nice little tuna (10 pounds). Next to him is the Purple Wonder lure – it hasn’t let us down yet but it is definitely the worse for wear. The tuna didn’t seem to mind and will grill up nicely.

I really would like to fish more but we are already buried in Mahi Mahi, Tuna, and Wahoo.

Ooops – Steve just hooked something large on the bottom rig (we are at anchor in 60 feet of water). Whatever it was, it was very large and broke the rig off. Just as well – we are running our of freezer space.

Cheers