Giant Trevally off the rocks at night

"A front is moving towards us and will pass around midnight..."

My eyes were just fixed on the weather map. Due to the cold front to pass over us at midnight, a drastic change in weather was expected; rain fall, gale, and rough sea. So I knew I'd have a limited time of fishing this night. I decided to try the same rock as the last night and quickly set up fishing gears.

The tide current didn't seem as nice as the last night, meaning that I had to wait for a school of GT to come close to the rock for a while. I had made frontal casts for an hour or so, but nothing happened. I then cast towards the rock to my left. It was a sudden - after a few times of popping (I was using a surface popper), a nice-sized GT took my popper and immediately started to run like a mad bull.

The GT was obviously trying to go to the other side of the rock to my left, so I needed to stop it right away. However, the hooks suddenly came out... I knew the reason: the bite was so sudden that I couldn't properly set the hooks on. GTs have a big solid mouth that needs to be hit hard. Thus there was no way for me to prevent the hooks from coming out, so I didn't regret it too much and restarted to cast towards the dark ocean.

In an hour I got another bite in the offing, but couldn't hook it up.

The next bite was about 15m off the rock. I waited a second or two till the fish turned, and then I pulled the rod up sharply. On! As the fish did not struggle so much at the beginning, I thought the GT would be around 10kg or so. But, as the GT suddenly started to dive towards the bottom so powerfully, I realized that the fish would be a lot bigger. As the GT was about to reach the pointy rocky bottom, I had to stop the line from unwinding. Hence I pulled up the rod as much as possible, in order to increase the angle so that the line didn't touch the sea bottom. But finally, busted off!! In addition, I fell backward and hit my butt onto the rock.

"*+%$#~}$...!!!"

I moaned due to the terrible pain, but getting busted off was much more intolerable for me. When I lose a fish, I usually become timid and lose confidence, but this time was totally different. My heart was burning, and I resolved to do anything I could in order to catch the next fish.

Even though I was quite excited, I did not lose a logical thinking. I decreased the drag strength so that the fish wouldn't go directly to the sea bottom. This in turn means that the next fight would take a lot of time, but I was prepared for that.

It was when I felt humid wind on my cheeks, and clouds were covering the stars in the sky. I felt a small bite approx. 40m off the rock I was standing on. Though the bite was really calm, I didn't expect a small fish. I sharply pulled up the rod twice, and prepared for a run.

Indeed, the GT wasn't small at all, and it dashed at high speed! I further pulled up the rod to apply more pressure to the GT. I did not cup the spool, as it might increase the pressure so sharply that I would get unbalanced and pulled into the dark ocean. So I kept the angle of the rod up, hoping the fish would stop shortly.

But the GT didn't care about my effort at all (of course!), and kept running away. Once the GT was about to stop, but immediately restarted to run. I had an intuition that if I had not stopped this second run shortly, I would have lost this fish. I put more weight to the rod, and finally succeeded to stop the fish. However, I faced the next difficulty - the line was touching the rocky sea bottom. I then used the "push-and-pull" technique: I pushed the rod to make the line slack and rapidly pulled back the rod. This way the line got untouched from the bottom rock.

The real toughest part of the battle was from this stage. The force I got while I was trying to stop the run of the GT severely damaged my lower back. Each time I reeled in and pulled up the rod, my lower back terribly hurt... but I continued battling the fish. The GT struggled so hard, and I had two crises where the line touched bottom rocks, but using the push-and-pull technique as above, I avoided to get busted off.

The GT eventually came closer to me. I had to be really careful so that the line would never touch the sharp rocks at my feet. The fast action of MC Works' Raging Bull 106XX, specially designed for fishing GTs off the rocks, allowed me to conduct this non-trivial task without big problems, as the rod has long reach.

I finally managed to pull up the GT to the surface. At this time I had no idea how much the fish would weigh, due to the distance from myself to the fish, and due to the dark sight.

Landing this GT was another hard job. My gaff pole was just as long as to reach the sea surface, but anyway I and my partner managed to put the gaff in. I and my partner were more than careful not to fall down to the ocean while bringing the fish onto the rock. Oh, how heavy the fish was!

Having the huge head of the GT at my feet, I realized the actual size of the fish. It's much bigger than I had expected during the battle. Moreover, the rear hook was set in the mouth, and the front one was set around the gill cover. This is why it was extremely difficult for me to control the fish...

Giant Trevally 138cm 40kg!!

To be honest, by the fact that I caught this solid fish, I was sort of surprised rather than pleased, because I hadn't really thought of landing a 40kg fish off the rocks at night. My initial goal was to catch a 20-30kg fish off the rocks, but my catch was actually much larger.

I felt a drop of rain and the onshore wind was getting up, a sign that the front was approaching. Time to stop fishing had come. We quickly packed up and left the rock. Consequently, the bite was the very last chance for me this night, and fortunately I won one of the biggest battles of my life.

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