Sidney Kennedy reports on a great day sharking with his daughter Amy and nephews Kenneth & Kristofor:
Every year my nephews Kenneth and Kristofor join me on a fishing trip and this year they wanted to get in on the action with Amy’s video clips. As the weather was going to be fair, we decided to head out shark fishing, and luckily for us, it turned out to be the right choice. With the offal from the fishmongers out of the freezer, all we needed was some fresh mackerel for hook baits. We launched the boat at 7 am, had our bait caught by 8 am, so we steamed out until we hit a depth of 250ft and got ready for some action.
With all the rods out and the chum working its magic, it didn’t take long before Amy’s rod was bent into a 40lb shark which she had no problem fighting and bringing to the boat. After another hour Kris was into his first shark of the day. It fought hard, and as we got it to the side of the boat we estimated it to be around 80lb, but sadly it slipped the hook. With his rod back out, we had a small shark trying to take our bait, but we couldn’t manage to hook it.
As I looked at the floats I could see my one slowly moving off to the side so I grabbed the rod and started to wind. When it tightened to the float the reel screamed and it felt like a big fish. At first, it fought close to the surface, but when it realized it was not winning the fight it set off on an angry dive towards the deeps, what a run… After a while I got the shark to the boat we could see it was over the 100lb mark. We got it into the boat, quickly unhooked it, and kept putting buckets of water over it as we do with every shark. It measured 1.865m, just over specimen length.
After a safe return, we put all the rods back out and freshened up the chum bags. It took another 40 minutes before Kenneth’s rod screamed off and with the rod bent into the shark it headed towards the deeps on a strong run just like mine and didn’t want to come up. With Kenneth’s arms getting tired he was just able to keep the pressure on until I could grab the leader, and we could all see it was another monster over 100lb.
With the fish back safely in the water, Kenneth sat down and said ‘if my rod goes again someone else can fight it’ 😆😆😆. Amy was back into the action soon after with a fish of the same size, and as she was fighting the shark she said to herself out loud ‘why do ye have to catch the big ones’?
Just as we were landing that fish, Kris’s rod took off with another good run. With Amy’s fish returned, we could help Kris with his one. It was another hard fighting fish, and like his last shark, it came to the side of the boat and slipped the hook. All he could say was as long as it is OK, I am happy. Hopefully next time Kris will get his monster…
Tune in to all the action on Amy’s YouTube Channel