FishTwits Blog

04-29-09

Bare Hand Fishing

Hi Everyone, I am Eric (@zirgzirgulis). So you may have seen some of our success at  Lake Häckerberga (which with my speech impediment  I kept calling lake huckleberry). Now as you may have already read from the previous post from Steve that some of the inspiration that led up to our trip was his camping excursion to Lake Vomb which resulted in him jumping into the freezing lake trying to catch a pike with his bare hands. As he shared this story with me I suddenly remembered a time back in California where my Friend and I actually did catch a fish, a big mackerel with nothing but our hands.

My friend, Shane and I currently had one of the best jobs anyone could want in the summer, Kayak tour guides for La Jolla Kayak and one of the perks was that we got to take kayaks out whenever we wanted. We took this to our advantage and started to spearfish from our kayaks rather than from the coast. So on one of our trips; we were about two miles out from the La Jolla cove fishing for yellowtail.

It is one of the best days ever, no wind 30 ft visibility and tons of bait fish swimming around us, which only meant one thing… we were in the right spot. Soon enough the schools of yellow tail came in to prey on the bait fish and we in turn preyed on the yellow tail. Our success was not unnoticed, soon enough a charter boat came along and started fishing about 80 yards from us.  We figured we would have another 20 minutes before more boats would come to try and share in the success of the charter boats. It gets annoying when you’re free diving because you can hear the motor engine of the boat and there is always the possibility of surfacing and getting ran over by a boat who disregarded the dive flag on the small kayak. So when two more boats showed up we decided we should leave but as we were swimming back to the kayak we kept noticing splashing on the surface of the water.  We got back to the kayak loaded all gear back on but we kept noticing the same splashing. As the splashing was not far from our kayak we decided we would check it out. Upon closer investigation we discovered it was a big Mackerel flopping around the surface.

We looked at the fish and could not figure out why it was chilling at the surface. We looked around and remembered the charter boats. Allot of them were bringing up fish but then a lot of them kept losing fish that they hooked. We figured that this fish must of had the fight of its life and got away from the charter boat and now only had the energy to relax on the surface. As we were floating next to the fish it flopped out of the water right in to my hands. Taking it as a sign from god we preceded to take the fish back with us, and turn it into some very tasty fish tacos. I guess in the end the secret to catching fish with your hands comes down to Luck.