The rain squalls and wind took a break on the Windward side so I was finally able to take Terry out on his Scupper Pro to explore the deep. He had guided me on my inaugural Westside kayak outing a couple weeks before. The deepest he had previously gone on the Windward side was about 130ft and that’s where we started dropping the damashi in hopes of finding nabeta. All I could manage was a puny skinny nabeta I released. An opakapaka pup of about 8 inches came up next and I tried depressurizing it so it could go back down but it floated so I had to keep it. Then the deep water lizardfish swarmed us.
We kept going deeper in hopes of finding the opelu piles. Terry put down a lizard fish as live bait and took a big strike that managed to come off his hooks. That gave me the idea to drop down a twice frozen opelu while hunting for the bait schools and after a while my reel went off! After a spirited, jerky fight a very round kawakawa came up that had taken both hooks so far down I had to cut the leader. I brained it to calm it down, and bled it over the side until the runoff ran light pink. The kayak cockpit looked like a crime scene and took a while to wash off.
Terry headed into the shallow ledge to damashi for reef fish, and I tried to find more pelagics. Sure enough my multitasking skills tripped me up. My damashi rig snagged my bait rig and as I tried to clear the mess I wrapped the bait rig line around my rudder. So I headed into the shallows to look for Terry. I couldn’t raise him on the VHF radio even though I could hear other kayakers 2 miles away, and turns out his radio wasn’t receiving properly. I finally reached him when I was a half mile away. This drove home the point to test your safety equipment and make sure all are in proper working order. Had I needed help Terry wouldn’t have heard me and I would have had to call the Coast Guard or nearby boaters. Terry has since been in touch with the radio vendor to trouble shoot the range problem.
Terry had been catching small and medium moana on his damashi and had one out as bait. I joined him, and found good marks on the deep end of the ledge, as I drifted shallow. Small weke nono and moana climbed on but nothing big so I reset my drift and went over a better mark with bigger fish. Dropped the 60gm tungsten jig with glow spinner blade, which makes the jig look like it has a fluttering tail, and made contact with something that yanked a lot but couldn’t pull drag.
Up came a Heller’s Barracuda (kawalea or kawelea, depending how exact you want to be) that tried its darndest to either throw the jig or bite through the leader.
Nothing bit Terry’s live moana and we had been out for 5 hrs and still had a couple miles to paddle in (paddle and motor in, in my case), so we set a comfortable pace and let the trade winds help us. It was so nice not to have disorganized following seas to worry about.
The damashi bite was better than it had been the last few trips. Dunno if that was because the water had warmed or if we were just able to fish more effectively in the calm water. Some odd ball fish landed were baby kaku, small trumpet fish, baby porcupine fish and some mystery fish that busted our light leaders.
I picked up some ice on the way home and left the kawakawa and kawalea packed in a cooler over night. When I cleaned the fish the next day, they were in great condition. The kawakawa weighed 10lbs after being bled the day before, but was fat because it had eggs and a belly full of decomposing small fish of various species. One looked like an oama that hadn’t made it in from the deep yet. That’s a good sign, maybe the oama are making their way in now.
Kawakawa has a bad rap as a bloody tasting fish, but if bled well, cleaned properly and wrapped in paper towels to remove more blood, the flesh has a great consistency and more taste than small yellowfin tuna. There’s also so many usable parts. The kawakawa was shared as follows: center bone for my neighbor to deep fry, fillets with dark meat removed for a friend to eat raw, eggs for my oama buddy to palu, belly strips went into the freezer to be used as bottom fishing baits, and the bloody scraps went to my sister’s cats. I also prepped the opakapaka pup and kawalea for my neighbor to steam.
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