Needle in a haystack
If you’re a regular reader of our blogs you’ll definitely be familiar with our fishing exploits and the Mahi Mahi (aka Dorado); it’s one of our favourite fish to catch (read: eat). We recently had a remarkable encounter with 2 of these beautiful fish.
Before setting out into the pacific almost 2 years ago, my fishing experience consisted only of coastal fishing around BC for salmon, cod, dock perch, and the like. Fishing and finding fish was done using features of the ocean floor and coastline: drop offs, pools, points, kelp, river mouths. That you could find life, in abundance, thousands of miles from land in water kilometers deep was astounding, even unbelievable.
Yet we have seen whales, dolphins, birds, jelly fish, and all varieties of fish even in the remotest locations. And we’ve caught a few of those fish too! Often we remark on the odds of a lone fish sighting, and then biting, a 5 cm piece of rubber in millions of square kilo meters of ocean. And while all the scientific, empirical, and economic signs point to drastically declining fish stocks, it often seems that there must be more than a few left if the miniscule snaking path our lure traces regularly encounters willing pelagic prey. Up until the most recent passage to St. Helena, we haven’t usually had trouble catching fish. Let me re-phrase that, we haven’t had trouble hooking fish; our first attempts at landing deep-sea fish were less than successful.
Until the Atlantic. We had heard from other cruisers that it was very difficult to catch fish in the Atlantic. When we landed a tuna on our second day out of Cape Town, we thought that these were just rumours; it looked like we’d be eating well all the way to Brazil. However it was not to be. Not wanting to catch any more fish until we’d used up the rest of our perishable provisions, we put off fishing further until the last 5 days of the passage. And then our luck ran out. We had the lines out from dawn to dusk every day with only 1 bit. Drat. Ah well, once land was in sight we packed away our lures and resigned ourselves to eating not-so-locally and less than fresh.
On our second morning at the beautiful island of St. Helena. We were anchored a 1/4 mile off shore in 20m of water. With very little in the way of run-off from the land, the water surrounding the island was remarkable clear. Just as I finished brushing my pearly whites and staring at the reflection of my chicklets in the water, I sighted a massive female Mahi Mahi casually swimming in the shade of Khulula! Wow! Never before have we encountered one of these fish so close to land and so calmly swimming near us! Then out from under the boat comes an even bigger male Mahi Mahi! It is said that these fish travel in mating pairs, but obviously we had had first hand proof of this before. Here was evidence, a female and male casually swimming around our boat together! For a minute or two we watched as the fish swam in circles and figure 8’s under the hull. As they came closer to the surface we saw bright green and orange colours on the female’s back, near her head. It was difficult to tell at first because the Mahi Mahi is naturally so bright, but on second look, we could see this was in fact a fishing lure snagged on her. This lucky fish had struck a fisherman’s lure and put up enough of a fight to break the line to escape! And here it was so causally swimming under Khulula. What are the odds?
Editor’s note: The crew of Khulula only uses non-stainless steal fishing hooks and suggests you do the same. If your line breaks and you leave the hook in the fish’s mouth, it will quickly rust away, hopefully sparing the fish.