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Dawn and a group of bleary eyed excited anglers and skippers see the night slowly slip away as the light grows over the Indian Ocean. I am in Kenya with skipper and friend mark jury aboard his 33’ sports fisher (TEGA) for some more big game action off of the east African coast.
This will be my 4th time here and although I am not a great lover of the heat and humidity, the superb fishing and the whole African experience is so addictive I keep coming back. What I like most about the fishing off the Kenya coast is that it can be so explosive, one minute you are half asleep as the heat and the general throb of the engine takes its toll, when suddenly one, or more, of the trolling lures is savagely hit from below and all hell breaks loose. It could be anything, Tuna, Barracuda, Wahoo, Giant Trevally, Sailfish, any one of the three types of Marlin found here, blue, stripped or black. Truth be told it could be anything.
If it’s a tuna of any size (and many are) it will be a long and tough fight with the fish staying deep and slugging it out, if it’s a sailfish it will be fast and furious with most of the fight being on the surface or even the air!
I have been fairly lucky on most trips here and have caught Marlin, Sailfish, and many of the other species that swim off of this coast and some of the things I have seen are burnt into my memory for ever. For instance, going out on the boat one morning only about five hundred yards from the mooring and being suddenly surrounded by huge Manta Rays and Whale Sharks surface feeding on Plankton, another days a pod of Dolphins that stretched as far as I could see, thousands of them leaping about, and one day whilst we were Shark fishing a Tiger Shark that took a forty pound Tuna Shark bait of off the surface right behind the boat, eight or nine hundred pound was the skippers estimate, bloody enormous was mine!
My first Marlin capture was something else I will never forget, a crash strike on fifty pound stand up gear and a few moments of pandemonium as a Stripped Marlin of about one hundred and sixty pounds launches its self skywards and sets off on a spool emptying run, after twenty minutes or so of hard work, the deck hand grabbed the leader and the tag was ready to go in (most skippers out here prefer to tag and release all Bill Fish) in goes the tag and the Marlin goes ballistic it lights up like a neon sign and starts thrashing the water with its fin, tail walking, it even has a go at the boat!, despite all this the deck hand keeps hold and at last it calms down and is unhooked, we have to pull it along for a couple of minutes to help it recover, then as soon as it is strong enough its released to glide away into the depths of the azure blue Indian ocean.
Until next time
Terry Shergold.
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