Imagine this… You leave the winter gloom of New Jersey, travel across the country, across the Pacific, and by the following morning you are boating across unfished waters and getting smoked by big, tough dogtooth tuna as you start your day. Sounds good?
A trip like this takes a lot of planning. During all that planning, you’re learning, preparing for the trip, and questioning that preparation. Will I have the right gear? Am I ready for these fish?
This is the story of some very lucky anglers who did all that planning and preparation, and had the trip of their lives fishing in French Polynesia.
Upon our arrival to Papeete we got greeted by our driver that took us to the hotel for a short break to meet up with Carlos.
Around noon we had to catch another flight from Papeete to Fakarava where the boat was waiting for us to start our journey to Tahanea,
The boat set sail around 6:00pm and we reached Tahanea at 8:00am 14 hours of sailing to be greeted by angry waves right at the entrance of the passage to the Atoll. The visibility and the clarity of the water is hard to describe, it was so hard to sleep as the excitement was taking over.
At 8:30AM we took off to start fishing, Carlos along our local guide G suggested to jig the passage for dogtooth tuna. The drop off at the entrance goes from 60 feet to 900 feet with a 200 feet distance from shore. On the first drop we got smoked by non-stoppable fish while every one of us screaming in every direction. It was a such chaos and a scenario that accompanied us for the whole day! We could not succeed to land any doggy on that day due to cut off and sharks. When we had a successful hook up the shark came in to claim it. It was very frustrating but the action was the best I had ever seen and I recall that we lost a bit over 40 jigs on that day between the 3 of us.G suggested to replace the Kevlar cord by wire leader, I was not in favor for it but there was no other option and it will be good to try something new and see if it works. So we set up all the jigging rods with wire cable connected to the hook and the Fluorocarbon leader was ranging from 130lb to 150lb.
