God Brings it at the Jetty!

I had tried to catch fish a few more times since my first episode, but with no success. Each time I went, I did gain a new level of confidence with regard to the huge crowd of people that come very close, watch, and ask questions about my rod and reel. Today I broke away for an hour, bringing some frozen sardines that I bought at the fish market last week.

I started by trying to catch some live bait. No matter where you are, live bait always works best. After 30 minutes of no hits, I put the jig away and set up a Carolina rig. This rig consists of a few egg sinkers that can slide up and down the line, plus a swivel to stop them from going down all the way to the hook, and of course a hook at the bottom. This rig had 30 pound test line on the hook, but my reel was loaded up with 12 pound test Big Game line. This line casts nice and far, but it is quite light for ocean fishing, so I was hoping that I'd have only a medium size fish on, at best. The rod I have here is a 10-20 pound rod, and the reel is a Penn AF 4000, which is small but works like a charm. One other thing worth mentioning is that Indian hooks do not have a hole in the end of them. It looks like there is no way to tie a line onto them. After working at it for a while, I figured it out, however, and this medium-sized hook was the weapon of choice for today.

After about 10 minutes of throwing sardine parts out there, I finally started to feel uncomfortable. I thought to myself, "Here are all these Indians watching the expert angler for all this time, and I haven't had a single bite. Man, this is lame." I was really hoping that I would not have to pack up and go home with a complete shut-out. And so I did what all expert fishermen do in these kinds of situations - I prayed and said, "Lord, I'd really like to fight a huge fish. Can you make a huge fish hit my line, right about... NOW?"

I had barely finished this prayer when my line had a tug. If you fish, you know how the adrenaline starts up. I stood up and set the hook, and then my line really took off. The 30 Indians watching quickly turned into 50 or so as I got set up for a real fight with a real fish. The fish peeled about 100 feet of line off really fast, and this let me know I was NOT dealing with a boy lama fish.

The fish went off to the left, and I had to ask the men to move so I could position myself well to fight the fish. They were very happy to help by guiding me so that I did not slip on the rocks. Finally the fish got really ticked. It took about 200 feet of line while I continued to tighten the drag. The fish just didn't stop taking line for about 60 seconds. I looked down at my reel and saw that I only had about 50 feet of line left. So I tightened the drag down more and more, all the while praying, "Oh God, don't let this line break!" As I said, I only had 12 pound test on, and at that moment I would have given some serious coin to swap it for 20 or 30 pound test, but that's only dreaming. While having these thoughts, the fish slowed and then stopped. It was way, way out there, but it stopped moving forward and just kept pulling hard. After another minute or two it turned around and came back at me, so I was able to recover about half my line.

This continued for about 15 minutes and the fish finally started to get tired. My arm was burning, of course, but I knew that I would win this battle, now that he was giving up. I asked a young boy if he would carry my backpack and follow me, and he was happy to do so. I worked the fish down the jetty to the sandy part of the beach and then I was fighting him with good prospects of landing him too.

By this time I had from 100 to 120 Indians all around me, and they were enjoying it almost as much as I was. These guys are simply the best. It turned out to be a HUGE stingray, and these guys went into the water up to the knees and masterfully landed the beast. They broke the stinger off so it wouldn't hurt anybody, stuck their fingers in its nose holes, and brought it over to me. I got one picture of it laying on the sand, and then gave my cell phone to a guy so he could get a picture of me holding it. Then I tried to pick it up, and I couldn't even lift the thing. Now, I regularly lift 40 pound dumbells in each hand, but I couldn't lift this stingray. It had to be 40 pounds or more. They helped me prop it up for a photo, but the guy using my cell phone didn't seem to understand that he needed to click the Capture button, and in the end all I got was the one photo of it lying on the sand. I gave the stingray to the men and I think they were going to use it for bait in their nets.

It has now officially been broughten!