And so we come to Thursday, day 3 for the competition. It did not start well! Our boat Sky Blue owned by the resort owners turned up but we knew that the deckhand had to catch a 3pm flight so it was decided to go out and rendezvous with another boat to pick the decky up. What we and the owner did not know was they were having trouble with the boat electrics, and after only a couple of minutes an alarm sounded and the outboards shut down. They started again and we joined the rest of the fleet at the start line for 8 am.
All went well for an hour then the same fault again 3 times. The skipper decided to return to Neiafu to try to fix the problem, so we were back at the resort for coffee. !0-30 Sky Blue was back so hammers down we headed out to sea again minus the deckhand. about 11 am the lures were back in the water and all was well, for 10 minutes!
then the same fault, and while the skipper pulled on wires, we pulled the lures in to stop them tangling. The outboards started again so I payed out a greenish head lure and put it on the face of the third pressure wake wave behind the boat as the other 3 lures went back to their positions, 5 minutes later I glanced at the green lure to see it dissapear in to a big mouth with a long bill straight up in the air.
Markus was in the chair, and after about 25 minutes the fish was at the boat, I passed the tag pole to Eric who put the tag in and passed the pole back to me, Peter grabbed the gaff and managed to pull it in to Erics ankle, luckily not too hard, a few minutes later the marlin estimated at 150kg was in the boat.
Back in went the lures, then the motors cut out and could not be started again.
So there we were 10 miles from base drifting out in to the vast Pacific with a good breeze pushing us away from home. A call on the radio had the boat owner sending out one of his flash charter yachts to rescue us. Of course a huge workup of skipjack tuna with birds diving slowly surrounded us, and we could do nothing.
2 hours later, Time Out caught up with us and took our anchor rope and tied it off to a cleat on one hull, this did not work well and the rope broke and thudded in to the screen of Skye Blue. The second attempt was tied off to a bridle across the stern of Time Out.
3 hours later, we arrived at the resort and the Marlin weighed 158 kg. So in an hour of fishing we had the best fish of the day against the 5 other boats 8 hours on the water.
The resort owner gave us each a $250 dollar refund for the messed up day. Did we care, we had increased our lead for the teams event.
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