Well that was a bummer. A few weeks ago, on the Full Moon day, I went out to the Windward/Eastside in rainy conditions. Wind wasn’t bad and the brown boobies were circling around looking for bait. I had high expectations but the big balls of bait and bottom critters I had seen during the previous trips weren’t around so I resorted to dragging frozen opelu out to 250ft and back into 90ft. I hadn’t weighted down the bait so the line was slack on the surface as I spun around to unhook some moana off the damashi rig, and wrapped my trolling line around my rudder. I ran the motor to spin the opposite way of the wraps and succeeded in sucking up yards on my Invisiline fluoro leader and Sufix 832 braid around my motor shaft. I could smell a burning plastic smell as the motor turned so I sadly turned the motor off and paddled the 2+ miles back to shore with almost no wind on my back to blow me in. My frozen opelu was still hanging off my motor and didn’t even get nibbled by rubbish fish.

On land it was quickly evident that I couldn’t free the line without disassembling the motor, so that was the end of a very unproductive trip. At home I cut off as much line as I could but there was braid fused in the plastic motor housing, which was sliced down and melted by the friction of the braid whipping around.

I had to send the 2.5 yr old, out-of-warranty motor into the Bixpy factory in San Diego. They cleaned out the debris, replaced the rear plastic housing (labelled “1”) that was chopped down by the Sufix, tested it and sent it back to me with Priority 1-Day mail, for a reasonable fee.

It was very reassuring to know that Bixpy would be able to repair my discontinued motor quickly and reasonably. Now I gotta figure out why fishing was so slow during the Full Moon, rising tide. It’s been an unlucky Summer and Fall for me. I’ve missed a bunch of light wind days, and haven’t caught opelu the last 3 times out.