can we help
+44(0)1983 296060
+1 757-788-8872
tell me moreJoin a rally

Menu

Neverland - Neverland Leg 2 - Days 3 & 4



Day 3 & 4

Patience is a virtue. Impatience hooks you a blue marlin. Let me elaborate…

Apparently I am ‘the environmentalist’ onboard Neverland. This is pretty ironic given that I have never really recycled, drove a diesel car in and out of central London twice a day for 7 years, have killed most plants I have tried to grow and consume an above average amount of meat and dairy. But, I do buy ‘happy eggs’…

Anyway, after their success catching a tuna only a coupe of hours into our journey (thanks to Dino’s lure), Tom and Dad were pretty confident that we would be dining on freshly caught fish for 2 (and a bit) weeks. As long as there is a bit of variety, I’m ok with that. The problem is, the fish they are catching keep getting smaller and smaller... In total they have caught 3 Tuna and 5 Dorado (pretty good effort) but ‘the goddam environmentalist’ (that’s me) keeps insisting the little fish live to see another day. So over the course of the last 48 hours there have been more lure changes than sail changes with just one little fish after another. At least they can reel these ones in and HAD managed to avoid any further encounters with the monsters who stole our big lures…until last night. I’ll come back to that shortly.

Yesterday afternoon, while staring longingly out at the lures bobbing along behind us, Dad was suddenly startled by a large dark shadow swimming in our wake. Hearing his shouts of excitement Tom and I leapt up to see what he was pointing at. A stealth like, 2 and a half metre long ‘fish’ was most definitely eyeing up our lures. OMG. The fish darted forward towards the lure and we all held our breath. Tom is thinking, gooooo oooon son. Dad is thinking, I reckon I can give this a go. I’m thinking, I hope they’re not thinking what I think they’re thinking. While we all stare at it, transfixed with excitement we realise it looks like some kind of swordfish. Ok….time for ‘the environmentalist’ to pipe up – ‘get the fishing lines in NOOOOOW’! Thankfully, at this point the fish had decided our lures didn’t look so delicious but before disappearing came right up to our stern, turned on it’s side displaying the most spectacular electric blue stripes down it’s body and darted underneath Neverland. Definitely a blue marlin. Definitely a close call. Apparently not close enough.

As the sun started to set and fuelled with disappointment and frustration at not having caught an edible sized fish for a few days we rigged up our large rod with one of our large lures in the hope that we’d catch another large tuna. Remember these are the same lures that yes, caught us a 20lb tuna but also attracted three monsters that subsequently ran off with our lures. It’s pretty obvious what happened next…impatience hooks you a blue marlin. The line went screeeeeaming off the reel, Dad leapt up, grabbed the rod, tightened the drag and seconds later we realised we’d made a BIG mistake. A HUGE blue marlin came flying out of the water like a missile about 15 metres behind our stern fighting hard to dislodge itself from the lure. At this point I am being most unhelpful screaming ‘cut the line cut the line’ but it had taken so much of the line off the reel already that Tom and Dad had no choice but to fight it for as long as they could to save as much of our line as possible. Failing to do so would mean their fishing days onboard Neverland would be over until we made landfall. Dad fought as hard as he could. I couldn’t watch. I had read that when they get close to the boat they dart under it and I had visions of the line getting wrapped around our prop and us having to drag a blue marlin 1600 miles to St. Lucia. After 15 minutes of fighting and watching the marlin thrashing about in the water, Dad handed the rod to Tom and suddenly the line went slack. The battle had been won. Blue Marlin 1: Neverland 0. Never have we all be so relieved to lose a fish. Oddly we got all the line and the lure back so we can only assume it either wasn’t hooked and was making a fuss about nothing or it managed to dislodge the hook from all it’s leaping out of the water. Who knows but we were all in agreement that it was the best possible outcome. Oh and the big lures…never coming out again!

Environmentalist Out.


Previous | Next