Fish guttin’ bikini

Enroute Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Greg is not a big fan of traditional fishing.  Not because it hurts the fish (as my friend Paul once said “if God didn’t want us to eat animals, why are they made of meat?”), not because he doesn’t like fish (bit of a sushi freak actually, except in Mexico) but because, as Tiffany so aptly put it, “There is a reason it’s called fishing and not catching.”

Look, normal fishing is boring.  Greg needs something else to keep him occupied.  Which is why shipboard deep sea fishing is so perfect for him.  The philosophy behind fishing on a sailboat is actually rather simplistic:  take a hook, attach it to a line, drag it behind the boat while you’re transiting.  Some people don’t even bother with a rod and just go straight hand line.  Greg is completely down with this style of fishing because it actually allows us to get something else done and sometimes you get to participate in “catching” without wasting your whole day staring at a line in the water.  Only downside is that the ‘sometimes’ is not as often as one would think.

In Mexico we had some really good fishing off of the Baja Coast. 

And we nabbed two fish at once sailing to La Cruz 

But ever since we started sailing towards Tahiti pickings have been somewhat…slim.

For the past 3 MONTHS.

Now you can justify that pretty easily.  As we’ve established, the Pacific is a big place and it’s mostly empty.  So, logically, there aren’t very many fish out here compared to the size of the ocean and most of the fish out here aren’t just hanging around; usually they are migrating from one place to another.

All this adds up to deepwater fishing underway being a mixed bag and, to understate the fact, an extremely unreliable means of providing substance for one’s crew.

But baby when it hits, it hits big!

And that’s exactly what happened a few days sail out of Bora Bora.  In the dead middle of nowhere.

Catching a fish is a huge boost to crew morale.  A big mahi-mahi like that will provide a great fresh barbeque under the stars and they don’t get any fresher than flopping on your stern!  Now imagine how we felt when we realized we had actually stumbled into a school of them:

We ended up hooking four Mahi-mahi and actually landing 3 of them.  Which provided a problem…what the heck are we gonna do with all this fish?

Well while Tiffany donned her special “fish guttin’ bikini” and got busy with the knives (yes, Greg taped this.   Hot chicks with knives and fresh sushi on the bone, what more do you want!?)

And Luchka donned her hazmat gear to prep the fixings for our moonlight fish barbecue.

Needless to say, our ship’s stores were largely untouched upon our arrival in our next port.

Like this article?  Check out “Fishing off of Ensenada, MX”