THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

In less than half an hour it was mission
accomplished, and seven hours later,
something of the order of fifteen others
had gone through the same process,
along with various other equally
desirable species. Malindi had proved
to be everything people said it would
be and more.
Marlin are also very popular
Kenyan sailfish are not big fish.
Typically they would range between
about forty and sixty pounds, but still
spectacular fish to catch, because
unlike marlin they are not so big that
you need to reverse the boat back
down on them.
Instead, you can stand there as you would with any other fish and fight them completely un-aided, so
you get to see all the leaping and aerobatics, which you can also get from marlin, but often miss out on
with the boat in reverse against a swell, as the man on the rod gets swamped with seawater coming in
over the back.
Everybody else on-board other than you gets to enjoy the marlins aerial spectacle. All you get is sore
eyes with the salt, sore shoulders with the fight, and if you're lucky, a photograph at the end. So in that
regard, sailfish are much more enjoyable billfish to catch.
I was also able to join in the tagging and release process which was good, except that not all of the
sailfish got to swim away. One in particular bellied up almost immediately it was released.
In a flash, we could see a huge brown blur in the water circling around underneath it. A tiger shark was
homing in. Then the order came from up top for one of the Kenyan lads to go in and retrieve it quickly
before the shark got to it.
I think I'd have told Angus where to stick his job. But life is different there, and as commanded, in he
went. Thankfully, he won the race, but only by a small margin. A very difficult thing to watch.
Wahoo were probably the most prevalent 'other fish' species we also encountered, which on the thirty
to fifty pound class outfits used for the sailfish went particularly well, the best of which I had weighing
in at fifty five pounds.
We also had a few similar looking kingfish, along with quite good numbers of small yellowfin tuna,
skipjacks, and bonito, one of the smaller specimens of which went on as a live-bait fished deep using a
heavily weighted down-rigger. This produced both the biggest and the toughest fish of the day. A giant
trevally or GT of around seventy pounds.
As good as that might sound, you don't want to be hooking up too many of those things in quick
succession. The power GT's have is unbelievable, particularly when hooked so far down where they
stay and slug it out rather than making long runs.
Imagine dangling a hook down from a motorway bridge and latching on to a lorry travelling in first
gear, then trying to stop it. That's deep water GT fishing. So when Angus offered to put another livebait
down, understandably, or was it wimp-like, I decided to give that one a miss.
Day one was my trip to remember. Instant success with the sailfish followed by all those others, not to
mention the wahoo, kingfish and GT, and the remaining days were pretty much a repeat of the same.
453