The waters off Monster Bay are prolific. The channel between Tahuata and Hiva Oa is deep and sports a large population of pelagic species. While trolling, bent rods were the order of the day and we picked up a number of the locals.
A picture of our friend Dan doing battle. Not sure which one this was, but here are the possibilities.
A nice wahoo.
A short billed Pacific spearfish.
Or a very nice yellowfin tuna.
As mentioned in my last post, a number of these critters (and others) moved directly in to the bay in 50 feet of water during the night time hours. It generally began with a good red snapper bite.
The snapper were exactly the size that everyone back here would just LOVE to catch. Unfortunately, the locals told us that they were all contaminated with ciguetara – a neurotoxin generated by small reef organisms that gets concentrated in larger fish up the food chain that feed on them. The effects if you eat one are serious so we sadly steered clear. They did, however, make excellent bait for our night time fishing activities.
We started out with our 30 pound spinning tackle but rather quickly realized we were out gunned.
This prompted a switch to our 80 pound trolling gear. Nope – that wasn’t enough either. Our friend Dave fought this critter for about 5 hours well in to the wee hours of the morning (I went to bed). Pretty good sized giant trivially.
Along with a pretty good sized shark earlier in the evening.
Despite our successes, there was some kind of critter down there that no amount of fighting on 80 pound tackle could bring to the surface. The result was always the same – after hours of struggling, it would break us off. Time to up our game.
We decided that our booms would make a good fishing pole and our electric aft deck winch would make a good reel. The setup was to reeve 1/2 inch spectra line thru a snatch block on the boom to a turning block on the aft deck to the winch. To put things in perspective, the spectra line has a breaking strength around 20,000 pounds and the aft deck winch generates 4000 pounds of line pull.
Attached to the business end of the spectra line was a claw hook the size of my fist. We tried several traces between the spectra and the hook. 6 or 8 parts of 600 pound mono and 6 or 8 parts of stainless braided wire.
Here is a look at the setup.
The first night we tried the rig, we hooked up a 6 or 7 foot shark. The winch and rig made short work of things and simply dragged the shark up as if there was nothing on the line.
Well we thought we had everything figured out but Monster Bay and its denizens had other ideas. Over several nights, we hooked up a number of the big critters but in the end, all we had to show for our efforts were broken hooks and leaders.
While the unknown monsters of Monster Bay still remain unknown, we do have some thoughts. Possibly monster stingrays. A better probability is monster jew fish which can reach upwards of 800 pounds. Locals fear these critters more then sharks as they have been known to grab unwary divers as they swim by there layers in the rocks. Once they have a hold, there is no escape.
Needless to say, night time swimming was off the agenda.