Yahoos with Wahoos

Yesterday was a red letter day after La Gringa's experiment with short drop offshore bathing suit bungee jumping on Friday. The weather was workable. And we had a workable boat. We needed to talk to some people on Pine Cay. So it just seemed that the thing to do was go for a boat ride. We grabbed a couple fishing poles to troll on the way. No action at all for about an hour or so.

Then La Gringa hooked into her first wahoo ever out in about 200 ft. of water. She had a few fun minutes of bringing the fish to the boat, but unfortunately, something else noticed. The fight suddenly went all out of it.



He still looks surprised at this sudden turn of events, doesn't he? One minute he's zipping along scarfing up bait fish, goes for the shiny one ......Getting hooked was just his first problem. It got progressively worse. Talk about having a bad day.
We were a good distance outside the reef, and we hardly ever see barracuda out here. Besides, it was something bigger than that to consider this guy a snack.

Gives ya something to think about when snorkelling around on the outer side of the reef, that's for sure. But we still do it.

When Preacher sees a fish like this he says "they only left you the eyes.."

We were getting tossed around pretty good, in an 18 ft. boat on an honest 3-5 ft. swell with a foot of chop on the top of it. A couple of hours of that was about enough. I hooked something on a turn, but lost it. So we were heading back empty-handed to call it a day when La Gringa's lure took another hit. It was a good solid fish. She played the rod and the drag for a half an hour until she got it close enough to the boat for me to gaff and haul aboard.

She had just hooked her second wahoo ever, and we got to keep this one.

We took it to the Pine Cay dock to clean and fillet it.



Demented Dog took it upon himself to guard the fish, just in case it needed to be bitten. He does this. We can't leave him alone with a fish. If it's in a cooler, he will follow the cooler. He doesn't eat them. He just dedicates himself to biting them at every opportunity. We had to keep him away from this one. This thing could have taken a big part of his face off.

Of course people in the marina had to come over and admire the fish. La Gringa got the congratulations, a nice side benefit of getting the rod and reel work right. It was a surprise to us that she caught this on a lure with a monofiliment leader. Wahoo (Ono in Polynesian) have teeth like two sets of razor sharp serrated scissors. They can even bite through light braided wire if they chomp it just right. We figure this one went somewhere in the vicinity of 35-40 lbs.

The Pine Cay marina staff certainly noticed me slicing fillets off this fish. One of their new employees is named Giselle, and he is from the Philippines. He is camera shy, but he came over finally and when I was just down to the backbone and head, he asked us "You throw?" nodding at the head and making a throwing motion toward the ocean. "Do you want it?" La Gringa asked him, and his face lit up in a huge grin. Yes, he most definitely wanted it.

He yelled out to a fellow countryman also working here, who had been watching this whole thing from another dock.



" Hey , tesis pantalya ay giving ako ang buo panguluhan , tingin at lahat! "

I don't know what he really said. But I looked up what they speak in the Philipines, and it's Filipino, but that's just an Anglicized name for the Tagalog language. Something like 24 million people speak it as a first language. I guess I didn't know that. And in Tagalog, I hope that means:

"Hey, These dummies are giving me the whole head, eyes and all!"

We have had a lot of people ask us for the heads from mostly the larger of the fish that we get. There is a lot of meat in it, and it makes good soup. We know Giselle and his fellow immigrant Filipino on Pine Cay will be enjoying their own traditional cooking for a couple days.



So, we made a couple new friends here. See how easy that was?

When we finally got back to Provo it was the end of the day. I cut up the two fillets into meal-sized packages. We have enough for about a dozen meals. La Gringa called Preacher to tell him we had fresh fish and he was over in literally five minutes. We gave him about a third of it to take home. So, there's three families that get fed by one fish. Doesn't take much to justify going after them, not that we needed an excuse.

So that was our Saturday. Today we are recovering from five hours of bouncing boat and sunshine, a lazy Sunday. And La Gringa has sore shoulders from working that wahoo....plus some mysterious bruise she won't show me.