Blog Post 5 - It's Yellow Fin Time!
Blog Post 5 – Yellowfin Time! July 10, 2015 33:02.06N – 117:28.03W As we were headed from Dana Point to San Diego Harbor, Jirig put out the trolling line with a special lure. As he
After we filleted the fish and cleaned everything up we brought the deck chairs up the the bow with the speakers and rocked out to Nico’s music collection, got some sun and enjoyed a much deserved beer. What a day! |
was setting it up I asked him,” how do you know if you have something?” He said “oh you will know”. About an hour later I was sitting in the back of the boat on the cushions reading when all of a sudden I heard this really loud whizzing sound. The reel started spinning like mad right above my head. I yelled for Jirig and Nico. It was clear there was something on the end of the line. Jirig came and started reeling in the fish. As Jirig was struggling to bring this thing in Nico and I were running around trying to get him some tools to get the fish into the boat. As the fish came to the surface it was huge. None of us had ever caught anything so big. I got really excited and started yelling and screaming. There is a link to the video here that is posted on You-Tube. 
All we had was a gaffing hook that was attached to a baseball bat. We are not big fishermen so we do not have a lot of equipment on the boat. Jirig had to go down the boarding stairs and was hanging on with one hand while in the other he had the gaffing hook. It was hysterical but also incredibly dangerous. In hindsight we will not do that again. He brought the fish to the surface, handed Nico the pole and went down the stairs. He reached down and stuck the fish right in the gills and hauled it up to the boat. As it flopped around on the deck splashing blood everywhere Nico yells out “It’s a Tuna” and we look at it and the tuna has little yellow tips on the top of its fins. It was a Yellow Fin Tuna!! I had read that if you pour tequila in the gills of a fish it will die immediately. We didn’t have any tequila but we had some vodka. Jirig took the vodka and poured in on the fish’s gills and it with one last struggle it died. Jirig managed to keep the fish along the side of the boat and got a hose to rinse off the blood. We had to get the fish cleaned up carefully so we did not get blood everywhere. I went and got the bathroom scale, Jirig cleaned up the fish and brought it to the table where we weighed it. It weighed 21 lbs! It was a beautiful fish. Nico and I felt bad about killing it. I tried to make us feel better by telling him it was a fair catch and were we going to eat every bit of it but we still felt bad. Jirig said we need to get over it as we are going to be doing this a lot in the coming months. 
