We believe in sea monsters. Each time we head out bottom fishing in the deep, we hook up with something that we just cannot handle. Sometimes, it is a grouper with an attitude that just takes us down into the rocks and breaks us off. We know that happens as on our last trip out there, Roger Burnley had one get him hung in the rocks and he did the tautog trick of just giving the fish slack for a while and sure enough, it swam back out. Roger had it coming up and it went back in the rocks again. Free spool again and the trick worked a second time and this time he got it up. It was a 50-pound snowy grouper. Nice fish but no sea monster. Other times, someone will hook into something that just will not come off of the bottom at all and eventually something breaks: angler, leader, rod, line, or hook. We know that there are big sharks, grouper and wreckfish that get into the hundreds of pounds and we expect to tangle with a secret population of Atlantic halibut sometime we are out there.
It is never good to lose a fish after going toe to toe for an hour or so and we always wonder what it was that just broke our tackle. Wes Blow really hates it and he had John Bishop make him a custom rod just to handle these monsters. He still needs to get a new reel and harness for it but for yesterday, he went with his old reel. He had his grouper rigs tied with huge hooks and 300-pound leader. Wes was hunting for sea monsters. He hooked one and got into another one of those bad fights. I thought Wes was going to break his back. It turned out the 300-pound leader broke first. Wes was out of action for a little bit. Bernie Sparrer hooked up to what seemed like a nice grouper and had it coming up. It went back down and broke him off in the rocks. Wes was re-rigged and had stretched out his back so back into the fray he went and hooked up to something big again. He said this not in the same class as the last one but it still looked like a pretty good fight to me. He would get it up a ways and them it would go back down again. Overtime, Wes gained more than the fish could take back. Roger said, “Look at the size of that air bubble coming up”. We often will see air bubbles ahead of tilefish or grouper but Roger was not seeing bubbles. He had the first glimpse of Wes’ sea monster. It turned out to be an odd-looking shark. Counting the long tail, about 12-feet long and very fat. The thing had some wicked teeth. It did not have a dorsal fin where a shark is supposed to have one. It had a single dorsal fin back near the tail. It behaved pretty well until we tried to control it with a gaff and remove the hook. Wes was leaning over the boat and trying to get the hook out. I think the thing wanted to eat Wes so it was released with the hook still there.
We did catch a nice snowy grouper, some black belly rosefish, all the spiny dogfish you could want and we did catch some blueline tilefish (one citation-sized). We spent most of the time deep trying to avoid sea bass but still caught some of those which were released.
