Got back on the horse (kayak) 12 weeks after the shark attack. So much life out there now.

The tiger shark encounter happened mid-May of this year. I needed a couple weeks to process what had happened, and to get in front of the media storm. After that, the winds consistently blew ’til now, 12 weeks later. The longest I had gone without kayak fishing previously was 8 weeks, so I was badly out of shape and in need of an easy day.

I decided to return to the scene of the crime, but stay about a mile away from where the attack occurred. It was after 8:30am when I launched. The wind was calm and the sun was out, reminding me of the conditions when the shark attacked.

The bait balls at the opelu spot were suspiciously close to the bottom, and sure enough juvenile opakapaka latched on the damashi hooks, and eventually the tackle busters broke off some hooks. 7 inch kawalea (Heller’s barracuda) came up too, and finally an opelu made it to the surface before shaking off the hook. I gave up catching bait, put on a year old frozen opelu with a 2oz weight and paddled out to 250ft. No opelu balls or pelagics were seen on the fish finder so I came back in to film the tackle busters with the underwater GoFish cam.

The bait balls had moved about 50yds south of where they were earlier and I dropped the camera rig with a 25lb damashi to entice the tackle busters to come into view. A 10 inch (fork length) opakapaka was the first to come up, and sure enough little kawaleas followed. Every drop got hit but nothing broke off the 25lb line.

When I looked at the underwater video at home I was shocked to see small schools of opelu halfway down, looking at the damashi rig but not commiting because of the heavy line. In this video, after pulling through the opelu school, I dropped down and a paka pup and kawalea juvenile jump on the hooks. Look at all the vegetation debris the opelu are swimming through.

In this video I dropped the camera rig on a bait ball just a few feet off the bottom and actually bonked a kawalea. This footage seems to indicate that the tackler busters are kawalea after all. Often I have landed 1 paka pup and had the rest of the damashi rig busted off so I assumed the busters were paka but it looks like the paka gets hooked and kawalea then mob the other hooks and cut the line.

My GoFish cam ran out of battery after recording nunu (trumpet fish), hagi (trigger fish) and a zillion lizardfish on the bottom, so I headed into the shallow dropoff to see if the damashi was as hot there. It was. I hooked something strong on my 12lb damashi that fought like a papio and broke me off. So I dropped a jig down and felt it get grabbed and then it felt like it was stuck in a rock. I pulled it free and this happened 2 more times, with the last time, the jig released on its own. I think that was a tako (octopus) grabbing the jig and then holding the bottom, since the jig had no scratches from the rocks. I’ll need to get underwater footage of that next time! After releasing a bunch of full grown moana (manybar goatfish), I headed in.

No big fish caught but no shark attack either. And I now I know not to drop the damashi too far down otherwise kawalea will wreck it. All in all, a very enjoyable return to offshore kayaking.