So as not to hijack the tattoo thread, I'd like to talk a bit about fishing for game with a handline.

If it's of no interest here and has to be moved to the sport/liesure forum, so be it.

I first started fishing from a canoe when I was 18 and newly married. My wife and I lived on a property on the South Eastern side of Vanua Levu, Fiji. My parents had moved to NZ for medical reasons and I was left to look after the property....hence my marriage, as it was a very isolated life. The estate name was Narewa. Everyone from the district knew me and Narewa.

My then-wife came from nearby Kioa. Tuvaluan people that had settled the island in the 1940's. If you ever go to Fiji, I recomend going to Taveuni, then visiting nearby Kioa and Rabi.

Kioa was settled by Tuvalu people, and Rabi was bought by the British Phosphate Company to relocate Kiribati people from Ocean Island during their phosphate mining days. Visiting these two islands is like leaving Fiji and going to Tuvalu and Kiribati as the people have not assimilated with Fiji and carried on their own way of life. Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia all in one day. (I only assume Kiribati is Micronesian because they are so vastly different from the Polynesian Tuvalu, Samoa, Niue, Tokelau, Tonga, Cook Islands, and the Melanesian Fijians.)

Very distinct languages and cultures.

Anyway....

The Kioans led a subsistance life. They grew their food and caught fish. Often, they would paddle to Taveuni, fishing all the way, and sell the fish on the beach, buy some sugar and tobacco, then paddle the 8 miles home. (As opposed to the Rabi people who had the "pakatero", the BPC royalties paid each year).

They were mighty fishermen. They knew fishing like nobody else.

My FIL built a canoe for me. He taught me to fish so that I could feed his daughter. (There was not alot of affection between us). He taught me to sail it too, which is not so common, but very enjoyable.

My canoe was 16 feet long and had an outrigger on the left side. Sailing was a bit tricky with an outrigger. Running before the wind was excellent, but tacking was another matter. You could only tack in one direction because with the outrigger on the lee, it would gauge into the water......so when you needed to tack the other way, you would take down the sail, unlash the mast, lash the mast to the other end of the canoe and then sail "backwards", with the outrigger once again on the windward side, lifting out of the water.

Anyway...... Fishing. The Kioans had a fishing method that they called futifuti. It is comparable to jigging. You would go out to the yard, catch a white rooster, and pluck a few neck feathers to make your lures. Family secret to the method . So, in this place with no refrigeration, you could go out in the morning with no bait and come home at night with a decent catch.

Using futifuti, you would often catch barracuda. Normally nobody catches barracuda during the day, they are a night fish in Fiji, but futifuti would get them in 30 fathom. Fijians never catch barracuda during the day.

These are school barracuda and average about 40 cms. Wonderful eating, but excellent bait.

For big fish trolling, what kioans call takitaki, a whole barracuda is used with a very heavy line. 300 - 500 lb breaking strain. 300 was the norm for nylon monofilament but 500 deep sea braided line was used when you could get it.

The hook was a #1. (For some reason, here in NZ the hook sizes start at the smallest, but to us in Fiji, at that time, #1 was the biggest you could get).

You had to use stainless wire trace because giant barracuda, shark, and walu (Spanish Mackeral) would cut even 300 lb monofilament. About 40 cm of trace.

Trolling was a matter of getting to deep water, throwing out 50 metres or so of line, and then paddling. You didn't have to paddle fast...just a liesurely pace......untill you felt a strike! If it didn't catch, you picked up your pace. If it struck and caught, since the line would be wrapped around your right foot, usually you would get the canoe tipping backwards and getting alot of water untill you had grabbed the line and started controlling it.

Holding the line, you would use your body to twist the angle of the canoe to run nicely. Sometimes, if the fish put on a run, you would play the line out as slowly as your hands could stand. Giant trevally were always a problem because they would dive. I would say that a GT is a more prestigious catch than a marlin or walu if caught from a canoe. Scary stuff.

You play the line by feel. You feel you can start pulling yourself towards the fish, and you do. Eventually, with excess line washing around your feet as the canoe is often swamped by the first strike pulling you backwards, you get to the fish.

If it is a marlin, this is good because it has a beak. Grab the beak with a cloth (usually your shirt), and with your other hand use your cane knife to cut the fish's head and disable/kill it.

If it is a walu, barracuda, or something else, you just have to manage it untill you can get a good angle to club or strike it.

Once I caught a giant barracuda (onshore, I didn't measure it, but standing with my hands supporting it in it's gills at about my face level, it's snout was above my head and it's tail was flat on the sand...so probably 7-8 foot) and when it was alongside, it leapt out of the water and over the canoe, causing havoc with tangled line, and being on the outrigger side, it was difficult to wack. The awesome thing about that day was I sailed home and caught another identical one on the way.

In NZ, I disdained rod and reel fishing for many years, preferring to fish "mano a fisho" as I used to quip. My fishing buddies would laugh at me with my handline, but for some time the excitement caught on with them. We tried to introduce "extreme fishing" at Tutukaka Gane Fishing Club, but it never took on.

These days, I quite like my rod. So much easier!

About 4 years ago I had a chap contracted to sand and polish my wood floors. We chatted about fishing because I have alot of fishing memorabilia in my house. I divulged to him the secrets of catching big fish with a handline. About a year later, Mathew Watson, this floor polisher's son, was reported to have caught a marlin from a dinghy with a handline. Mathew Watson has his own fishing program on tv, and even appeared on Letterman for his marlin dive from a helicopter.

I unashamedly make no bones about claiming to have inspired him and divulged the vital "secrets", ie having a boat that is light in the water and grabbing the marlin's beak.

As to any questions about if it is "game" to use high strength line.... firstly, fishing in the way I did was not a game, it was a means of catching dinner.

Secondly, I ask myself, what is more difficult: to use a mechanical device designed to play out line just enough so it doesn't break (a reel with drag) while sitting on a comfortable diesel driven launch, or to use your brute strength and skill to pull the fish in while balancing in a craft that could capsize or be swamped that had to be paddled for miles before the fish even struck?

I know for a fact (ok, not fact but my sincere opinion), as I've done both, that handline, albeit high breaking strain, is a more difficult prospect.

There are arguments on both sides I suppose. For me, it was not about game, it was about dinner.

Certainly more sporting than a net, or for that matter, a stick of Gelignite. Both commonly used for fishing in Pacific regions.

Very interesting anyway.

By coincidence a mate stayed with me last week and he brought up a spinning rod and reel I left at his house years ago. We bought a 40 baht lure at Mae Sai and took it out to a local lake and tossed it around. On two occasions something largish came up and took a look at it.

I might look around for a better quality lure when I go to town tomorrow.

Cool!

That's not sceadugenga, sceadugenga has hair.

A normal day of fishing would start the night before. I would tie my white feather lures and prepare my fishing gear. 4 am start. Paddle east for about an hour so that I would reach a certain reef just at sunrise, the plan being to troll with a light line for bait fish, then do a big fish troll untill the sun was too high, then futifuti for the rest of the day, then a slow big fish troll all the way home. Usually the SE trades would begin about 3.30 pm, so I'd almost always have a good breeze behind me, whether sailing or paddling.

One day, I set out as normal. I got to the reef just as the first rays of the sun came over the horizon. (Incidentally, I was directly on the 180th meridian, so theoretically I was the first person in the world to see the sun rise each day when I was out at this reef ). It was beautiful and calm. There was a log jammed into the reef as a marker beacon and I could see the dim silhouette of a frigate bird sleeping on it.

I decided to begin with a light troll around the edge of the reef, so reached behind me for my basket of fishing gear..... and it was not there!!! Neither was my bottle of water!!!! I had left all my gear on shore!!!

Calamity!

The wife's grandmother was staying with us and they were both depending on me to catch dinner.

If I paddled home, got my gear and came back out, not only was it going to be tireing, but I would have missed the best part of the day for trolling.

There was only one thing for it......sitting on the beacon was "chicken" just waiting to be curried.

I quietly paddled up to the beacon. I carefully stood up, holding my paddle like a tennis raquet and struck the bird! It went down into the water, hurt, but not dead. It took about 5 minutes of chasing this thing as it thrashed about with a broken wing, finally I caught it and amidst some quite severe scratches, I managed to wring it's neck. Dinner!

I got back to the beach at about 7 am. The ladies had seen me coming and came to the beach to meet me. Either I had a very good catch very quickly, or somethng was wrong, otherwise I wouldn't have returned so early.

Well....we cooked that bird by simple boiling. After an hour in the pot, Kuku (grandma) took it out and asked me to taste it. It was horrible!!! Imaging the oldest toughest jungle rooster boiled in nam pla.

OK, boil it some more.

3 hours of boiling this thing and it was still tough as old boots, and still tasted like fishy fowl.

After that day, I have NEVER forgotten my fishing basket again.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Yes. Lucky for me it was a frigate bird, not an albatross.

Or perhaps it was the same and still today my karma pays. I never have had much good luck, but that which I create myself against adversity.

At night, I used to paddle out to the edge of the home reef to fish. With fising in the daytime, I always drifted, but at night I would anchor as it was fairly shallow, no more than 5 fathoms. The anchor was just a rock tied to a rope.

At night, the baracuda were rife in the relative shallows at the edge of the reef. Often I would lose my hook and sinker as the bait dropped down, even though I used wire trace. I figured out why: as the line dropped down, the bait would trail behind the sinker, so when the cudas struck at the bait, they would actualy cut the line above the trace. So I learnt to fashion a new rig which consisted of, starting at the bottom: hook, wire trace, sinker, wire trace, main line. This way, there was wire trace at the point where the bait doubled back past the main line as the sinker was the lowest point.

I was dirt poor, little more than a subsistance farmer. I could ill afford losing lead (we used sheet lead, not store-bought lead sinkers). One night, I was a bit slow when I got a bite, and the line was snagged. I figured that it was an eel or a cod because I knew I had felt it catch, but I had been immediately snagged, so the fish had bitten and retreated to it's hole.

Not wanting to lose my hook and sinker, I baited another line and dropped it over, tense with readiness. As soon as I felt a nibble and grab, I jerked the line and caught the fish. I pulled in the reef cod, with my first line and hook still in it's mouth!

Put that one down to great fish tales: catching one fish on two lines!

Another good tale that happened more than once: Catching barracuda during the day by futifuti, the fish would often be schooling in the deep and were voracious. It was not uncommon to pull in just the head as it's colleagues would snap it as soon as it was distressed by being caught. Sometimes the attacker was a bit slow and would chase it's victim, my catch, to the surface. Several times I have pulled a cuda over the side with another cuda firmly attached to it trying to chomp it.

We used to break up old car batteries for the lead and make the sinkers in a tea spoon. Just put a wire loop in the spoon and pour in the molten lead.

Every weekend we'd head for the coast, if it was fine we'd take the boat and on rough days we'd fish off the beach with long rods.

Winter we'd catch Australian salmon, you sheep molesters call then Kahawai, and summer was for whiting and snapper. Whiting are popularly the highest rating food fish but personally I preferred snapper, particularly in the smaller range, about 4 pound.

Trust the Aussies to call a third rate fish "salmon" to make it sound nice.

Just kidding. Actually, I'm quite partial to kahawai. They can be a great sport fish. People here use trout rods or micro-light gear to get them, although I just catch them in the regular way. Good for curry!

I think snapper is over-rated. Although a lovely eating fish, it is hardly worth the $30 per kg that it sells for. Mind you, out of the selection here, snapper does make the best raw fish salad.

When I was in Uttaradit with my gf's family, I made Fijian style raw fish salad for them. They loved it. The way I do it calls for loads of lime, corriander and chilli, in coconut cream, I also add cucumber and tomatoe, so it was not a completely alien dish to them. They loved it. I used salmon and mackeral from the city supermarket...whatever it was called. Big C?

That's a decent snapper in the photo!!

Not mine, it's off a website.

I only ever ate raw fish in the Torres Straits Islands. We got a four foot Spanish Mackerel behind the boat and one of the locals TI wife cut it up and "pickled" it in lime juice and chili. It was great! I might have a search for a recipe, those frozen "Dory" fillets in Big C are cheap enough to risk on an experiment.

All fish is an obscene price in Australia now. Even ordinary mullet fillets are at least $15 a kilo. Small salmon fillets are about the same and quite tasty.

Yes. Lucky for me it was a frigate bird, not an albatross.

Or perhaps it was the same and still today my karma pays. I never have had much good luck, but that which I create myself against adversity.

I was jigging for albacore near Midway once and an albatross took the jig. He just took flight and I had to bring him in like a kite. A lot bigger and feistier than they usually appear, when you're trying to get a jig out of their beak.

I know what you mean. Their beaks and claws are formidable.

I think the "jigging" to which you are referring might be what I'd call spinning? Casting a lure out and reeling it in?

The "jigging" in the sense I was using it was using a lure at the ocean bottom, not the surface.

I think the "jigging" to which you are referring might be what I'd call spinning? Casting a lure out and reeling it in?

The "jigging" in the sense I was using it was using a lure at the ocean bottom, not the surface.

Actually, it was trolling. trolling surface jigs (plastic squid lures) at about 6-7 knots. Later in the year you can use poles with a short 3 meter lead and live bait from racks off the fishing vessel, but while albacore are migrating jigs work best at dawn and dusk.

Something like this:

Gotcha.

Harcourt, loving the fishing tales from Fiji! Great read mate!

Yeah, keep them coming.

Thanks!

I didn't post here yesterday because I went fishing! . Got my quota of snapper (9), a huge John Dory, and 2 big barracuda. It was a perfect day: good weather, not too early a start (on the water at 10 am), not too late a return (back on shore at 3 pm), not too many beers....perfect. For any Aucklanders that want to know...I went out past the 30 metre mark, back of the Noises, towards Tiri.

The normal rule of thumb in Fiji, the common wisdom, was that fishing at night under a full moon was useless. I subscribe to this for normal fishing....however the Kioans, sublime fishermen that they are, knew better.

They taught me a method that always brought in a good haul on full moon nights, as much an art as a science.

I should describe the reef: From the sandy beach at low tide, the coral reef extended out as a flat plain about 10 -20 cms deep at low tide. The reef would extend out from the beach in some places only a few metres, in other places hundreds of metres. It would then suddenly drop off to about 3 metres deep, a sheer drop, sometime much deeper, to the sea bed of normal terrain interspersed with deeper coral outcrops that gradually sloped off to the deep deep.

What I would do was rig up two anchors (a stone of a few kilos on a light rope). Paddle out to the edge of the reef untill I was in a spot that I knew there were not many deep coral outcrops....looking for a relatively snag free area.

Anchor the canoe stern and bow so that there would be no swing or movement. Then wait. Silence was the standing order. Quiet. For me it was very pleasant, sitting in the canoe in the moonlight on a very calm night. The only sounds to be heard would be faint sounds from the shore: fruit bats squealing in the mango trees or papaya. You could distinctly hear dogs in the Kioa village (Salia) 4 miles away. Serenity. Peace.

After the "ruckus" you made with paddling and anchoring, it was pointless to try fishing, so just wait and listen to the quiet night, feel the slight motion of the canoe as you imperceptably move.

Wait. Quiet.

At some point in time, you feel that the world in the sea beneath you has returned to it's moonlit nervous

tentative ways. The nocturnal fish are wary and cautious in the moonlight, but silence and stillness has returned. Time to start fishing, keeping movement and noise to a minimum. Heavy line is used, about 50 lb breaking strain. No sinker. No swivel, no trace. Big slab bait....imagine a whole fillet of a 20 cm whiting or yellowtail.

Toss the line as far outwards as you can and let the sinkerless bait slowly descend. Here you have to use your instinct to judge how much line to play out and when it may reach the bottom. Gently, slowly pull the line in untill you feel the weight of the bait, ever so miniscule. Don't hold it too tight either because you want no resistance when the fish first takes the bait. Stay silent. Don't bump the paddle or bait board: the canoe is like a drum that transmits sound into the water. Wait.

When the fish takes the bait, it is with no warning nibbling, and yet it is not a sudden snatch. The line just starts going taught as the fish swallows it and continues on it's slow hunt of the seabed. Sometimes the line goes slack as the fish swims closer. Pull him in!

Once it's been brought up, you have to cudgel it on the head while still on the line. You have to hold it out in front of you to isolate the noise from the canoe/drum. You do not want a thrashing fish beating a warning to all his cousins.

Re-bait, and try again.

The fish caught are the same as those caught on moonless nights, of those found in 5 fathom or less, ie there are no huge walu or shark, no grouper, cod, or trevally. No barracuda either. Just reef fish of a decent size (2- 4 kilo).

Although serene at these times, the constant need to stay still and the concentration needed to continually feel for the near weightless bait from going slack is very tiring. Sitting upright with no back support, no taking time out for a drink or to eat. It is suprisingly exhausting. The fish don't mill around in schools down there either....you would be lucky to catch more than one in an hour. This fishing method is for essential food, not for fishing all night to get a big catch for selling or smoking. Bring in 3 or 4....that's enough to call it a night.

You don't always get the requisite calm weather on the full moon, so it's not a fishing method practiced every month. It has to be glass calm.

Funnily, I don't recall this method having a specific name. I call it full moon fishing .

I was never a keen night fisherman. Always got the line tangled... could never find anything.

Night fishing was like day fishing except I'd always anchor up. If it wasn't full moon fishing, then a Coleman lamp would be employed. A forked stick about 1 metre long would be lashed to the side to hang the lantern. Small bait fish would come to the light and they would be scooped up or speared. Garfish or piper mainly.

The Kioans had a great burley method. We would always take a bundle of breadfruit leaves and a basket full of tennis ball size stones. After filleting a bait fish, the head, guts and backbone would be chopped up finely to a nice burley consistancy. Take a handfull of the gunk and plop it onto the middle of a breadfruit leaf with a stone. Place your baited hook and sinker with the burley, then fold the leaf up like wrapping fish and chips. Your line will be sticking out of the package, so wrap the line several times around it to bind it, then hitch the line under the loops you've wound, forming a sort of highwaymans hitch. It's important to have absolutely no resistance to the line dropping down because the hitch will unravel at the smallest tug, so you wouldn't burley with your first bait because letting the line spool off the reel is too slow. Instead, do it once you've pulled your line in the first time and it is lying at your feet and very free flowing when you throw your burley package over. When the amount of line that has coiled at your feet runs out, you know you are practically at the bottom, and a small tweak cause the hitch to fall out and the breadfruit leaf springs open releasing a cloud of burley around your bait.

This method is so effective that if you do not get a bite almost immediately, then you are probably fishing in the wrong place.

I've tried to do this in Auckland without breadfruit leaves. Newspaper is too soft and ends up tangling your line, hook and sinker. Plastic is not an option obviously. Magnolia leaves have the "stiffness" but are too small. Banana leaves split too easily. I have not succeeded yet in finding a breadfruit leaf substitute.

We used to take the boat out at night with a spotlight and 12 volt car battery. Garfish were the most common catch and were "dabbed" with a hand net or speared.

We'd often wade the sand flats and shallow reefs with a kerosene pressure lantern and spear whatever we came across, flounder, mullet, even crayfish. Sometimes we'd come across a big eagle ray that would frighten the crap out of us.

I seem to remember a berley "trap" being available in fishing tackle shops. it worked on a slow release system. Too hard for us though, we just used to throw the fish bits over the side. Used to attract a lot of rubbish fish though like rays and Post Jackson sharks.

I fished in the home of the Great White shark so a weather eye was always kept open for them. I nearly ran one down once that was longer them the 4.5 meter boat.

4.5 m! Crickey. I haven't seen any sharks that big, though I know they are around.

I was never a keen night fisherman. Always got the line tangled... could never find anything.

Night fishing is like day fishing except we would always run over a rock or similar on the way home.

And finding the boat ramp was sometimes very hard if your home light failed!

I can relate.

No Great Whites, but I remember an occassion we were fishing in a bay off North-West Cape, near Exmouth, WA.

The fishing had been quiet and we we just talking and enjoying the sun and water. I was leaning against the side with my back to the water and our hand lines were out the other side.

I suddenly had all sorts of crap scared out of me as a Pilot whale "blew" about five feet behind me as it dived under the boat. An enormous sound that close on a sleepy day. Turned around to see hundreds of these whales moving at speed past and under us. Two of the heavy handlines suddenly went beserk, with the spools dancing all over the deck as the line peeled off.

The hooked whales never looked like stopping (doubt if they even noticed) and the lines were gone forever despite the guys trying to hold on.

It was suddenly quiet again, the whales had gone, but we were wide awake and shaking from the trauma of the moment.

I also recall another time, south of there, at Coral Bay, when a Killer whale put it's head out of water a few metres away from the boat to have a good look at us. Despite telling ourselves that they don't eat people, we pulled anchor and moved on with great haste!

apparently there is a fishing sub forum somewhere on this site

OK. I can take a hint.