Southern California Swordfish! Possible?

[slydawg]

Maybe next time!

[Mfish618]

78 was an epic year. We watched a guy on an 18 foot boston whaler throw on one 5 times before he stuck it. We saw the boat a week later with a small plank on it. The water was very green that year and the fish would stay high and dry for a long time. An epic year I doubt I'll ever see again.
Personaly, I'd not care to pull on anything larger than 100 pounds......they will hurt you bad. But good luck to those brave enough to pusue them. I've never seen a stronger fish than swordies.

[af dreamer]

Steve,Gene Grimes on the Legend might have had the best one year catch.Ted,Callan,George Williams on the Real George.Dickerson and Callan kind of tied.Ed Martin was another.Anyone that was on the water in 1978 had a shot at a banner year.I do know Gene had 2 2fish days that year.He helped me out a bunch on them.The best advice he gave me was if you throw on one and the line moves you swing.They go in on a bait so hard the get wrapped in the leader,that is why so many are snagged.Mine was in the pectral.Tom

[sdjfish]

Gene was the real deal, good luck on following in his wake.

[Fred Archer]

I have stayed out of this thread for a long time because I'm probably going to piss some people off, although I'll try not to and don't mean to.

There is a huge difference between catching daytime swordfish and catching swordfish, especially a lot of them. And the following applies to wherever they swim. It is that way over 90% of the swords caught each year, all the way back to when they were first fished for, were and are caught at night, when they rise in the surface column to feed and can be reached with baits, and/or lures. And I'm sure that the actual number, except for here, is way, way over 90%. Daytime fish versus night time fish is comparing apples to oranges. That's why I wrote two separate books on each style fishing. They are vastly different. Day swords rise up to warm up their body cores and to digest their food, not to eat, while night swords come up to eat...big difference.

And no matter how you want to slice it, for whatever reasons, California anglers, with few exceptions and not enough of them, don't like fishing at night. If that were the case in any of the other areas with good swordfish populations, they would be very rare catches there too.

I'm not knocking day swordfishing. It's a helluva lot of fun and takes some very special skills and knowledge to do right - skills that few possess and fewer still will ever divulge. It was even that way down in The Baja, where I finally learned one of those ways from two of the very best swordy guys with roots in Mazatlan, including Captain Thomas Duran. Those guys guard their secrets like the family jewels, but once I was lucky enough to become friends with them and they taught me their ways, we started catching day swords on an amazingly regular basis, but still, nowhere near as often as the night fish.

Someone not mentioned here, The Beak, has a long record of catching day swords for one fellow he worked for. He used pretty much the same techniques that we did and he caught a lot of fish over a long period of years.

A swordfish is a swordfish. There is no big difference between ours and others when it comes to how they live, feed, and behave. And the night time is the right time for catching them, but of course you have to put your time in and the more the merrier when it comes to crews finding them on a given night...and of course, it sure helps to have some plank boat buddies (who you aren't competing with for their daytime fish) to let you know where the fish are.

Sharks? The right gear and baits, rigging, etc.? It's all in the books.

[af dreamer]

Fred,your right,im sure there are many others I left off the list like Jim Donnely.In my book Gene was the best in the modern age.JMHO,Tom

[troutman775]

this was #468 i believe caught on a overnight out of seaforth about 2 years ago

[BiggestT]

Originally Posted by tunanorth

Tom,
How many broadbill did Mike Callan and Ted Naftzger have each?
Their span of sword-catching years was roughly 1955 to 1995, correct?
In your opinion was anybody better than those two for ROD AND REEL swords in the post-WW2 era?

Naftzger finished up with 49.

[jagerhunchback]

i've been on the elvis quest for about 6 trips thus far. pretty sure we hooked one on one occasion but had the hooks pull. my best advice (from someone who has'nt caught one) is to find a mentor that is pretty well dialed in. mine is tim r from the kona melton's shop. the great thing about night fishing in the islands is the bycatch is large type big eye threshers and big eye tunas. i'll continue my quest once i get out of this deployment, im betting on 2010 being my year!!! good luck

[Waiohinu Lawaia]

We've caught a few in Hawaii, drifting at night for ahi/tombo with live squid from an 80lber that came up dead to over 450 that came up very alive I hooked a nice one on the night troll, but it threw the hook after a few jumps. And of course we have pulled the hook on a few on bait as well (on different sizes/ types of hooks).

They are bad ass fish, and be ready for a long fight, and have a good leaderman and gaff man ready, or hope the fish dies before you get it to the boat

I'm gonna convince my buddy (well I think I already have) to take some day and night trips out of Redondo to where I know they congregate, and try both daytime deep dropping, and night trolling, got the 80wides ready, and have all the gear from fishing in Hawaii, I'll post a report if/when we make it out.

BTW, anybody doing a sword trip, night or daytime thats needs an experienced, deckhand, let me know...

[Fred Archer]

Just yesterday I showed our Chris Jones (Igloo Man) a DVD produced by some very well known and extremely successful local plank boat captains whose names I am not going to mention because this particular video, which is long and very well produced, was meant for their inner circle and a few friends and not the general fishing public.

Before commenting further, let me note that I fully understand and respect their wish to keep this video among themselves. Now, I haven't been told anything other than "this is for you and your guys, Fred. Please keep it to yourselves", but they needn't explain the "why" of that. I believe that the point here is that they do not want to advertise just how many swordfish there are in local waters. This is due to the simple expedient that they earn a decent, hard-worked-for and heavily-invested-in living from catching them and as such, are reluctant to have a big number of the fishing public, including the "outlaw commercial guys" who illegally sell their fish, get all fired up about swordfish. All that one has to do is look at the thresher fishery and how some anglers are abusing it and how some others are selling their fish, to get a perspective on the way that I believe that they think.

Although there are probably more than a few doubters out there on this, I could care less what they think; friends and I have caught night swordfish right here, along our coast. And just like the plank boat guys, we never weighed any of them or showed them off or even talked about them in any way, shape, or form to anyone who wasn't a close, tight-mouthed friend. We caught our fish at night and we butchered them and stowed the meat before we came back in. Those return times were usually at night, so maintaining a low profile was quite easy.

In our case, our reasons for our particular secrecy was two-fold. As selfish as it may sound, we wanted to keep an excellent, nearshore fishery to ourselves. A few well informed and skilled buds were great for night fishing, but a fleet of them? No thank you, was how we felt about that. Secondly, we knew that the damned drift gillnetters pay close attention to any and all sources of information on swordy concentrations and that included the sporty Internet sites. No way in hell did we want to help them in any way, shape, or form. Adding the fact that we got a great deal of help from plank boat friends on not only where the fish were, but what they were eating, letting that information out would have been a violation of many years of trust and cooperation. I cherished and cherish that sort of thing in fishing and in life in general.

Finally, yet another reason to keep local night swording under wraps was my knowledge of the average size of the fish here and my consequent certainty that if many locals went for them, that they would fish with inappropriate tackle (leaders, hooks, line, rods, and most of all, reels that were too small) and would wind up losing, killing in that process, and wasting these terrific gamefish. I learned that lesson many years ago when I wrote The Thresher Shark Book that started the thresher thing out here. In that case, even though the book taught the right gear to use, for too long many fishermen used girl's tackle for these big fish, got spooled, and wound up killing them. And the sad fact is, too many are still doing that to this day.

The right ways to do all of that and night (and day) sword fish are in my books, but the small number of them that we sell out here has proven to me that California fishermen, for whatever reason, are simply not interested in or willing to go to the trouble to read a book to learn how to play a game that they are simply not familiar with - and a downright dangerous one to boot! A very large number of fishermen (thank goodness) in many other areas start out, or even experienced ones bone up on different styles of fishing than California fishermen. Strange, but true.

Getting back to that DVD, I know that Chris was blown away by the average size and number of swords he saw getting run, stuck and landed (Man, is that exciting stuff!). We saw well over fifty of them stuck in the DVD. The bottom line being that there were damned few two hundred pounders; the bulk of the fish ran from over 300 to well over 500 pounds live weight, maybe even more. And the real mind blower was when they were off-loading one trip's (several days, how many I don't know) catch at the fish house and the total for the dressed fish was ten tons, Chris just looked at me and shook his head when he heard that number.

This video was shot just a few short years ago. They are here and they are here in good numbers and it is opined by some of my plank boat friends that the population has actually increased since the longliners were removed. The drift gillnetters are still killing them, but getting rid of the longliners has yielded good results according to those who know.

Finally, one other point was brought home clearly...it was how incredibly powerful and dangerous these fish are. Standard procedure for these guys is to button a fish (drive the lily iron through the back and out the chest of the fish), drop a lot of gear (lots of heavy rope, kill buoys, and very heavy chain), then let the fish fight the gear until he dies, then they pull them. But during hot "bites" they sometimes run out of kill gear, or other constraints such as oncoming weather or darkness force them to pull live fish. And when they do, they don't screw around. The "priest" employed for giving the fish the last rites isn't a billy club or even a Louiseville Slugger, it's a stainless steel, 12 gauge shotgun with slugs and buckshot in it that they shoot the fish in the head with at close range. And you know what? Sometimes it takes two or even three shots to chill those fish out enough to safely bring aboard AND some come in still alive, in spite of literally having their heads and bills blown off!

Yes, swordfish are dangerous as hell. And they are even more dangerous if you are messing with them from a small boat and the wrong end game gear and techniques. Considering that and the lack of willingness of those who would fish for them to truly learn how to do so, as far as I'm concerned, it is probably just as well that that's the case.

We don't sell the tackle, the end game gear, the bait, the line, the gaffs, the boats, the guns, or the ammo, or anything else for night swordfishing other than a couple of books that teach you what you need to know about that stuff and how to use it safely and effectively for a mere thirty bucks (half a scoop of squid) and no matter how many of those we sell, it ain't gonna make us anywhere near rich, so what the hell.

But they are here, and they are THE KIND!

Lord, I love Elvis!

Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite.

Over

[pro]

AMEN!!!