Palm Beach Daytime Swordfishing 11/19/16

George1

Ran out of Palm Beach with three of my buddies at about 8am yesterday. Tried fishing our first spot but the transducer wasn't working and couldn't read bottom. After a couple drops there, we ran a couple miles south and tried a drop on a different spot. We weren't very confident in our drops because we couldn't see bottom. Around 11:50 we started pulling up the bait to go run inshore and try something else. At 1500' the bait got slammed so hard the tip almost hit the water. The fish didn't get hooked immediately so I worked the bait a couple times before the hook finally sank in. We got him up to the boat without too much of a fight and we could see he was about a 150lb sword. I don't have a harpoon (Will definitely be getting one very soon!) so I leadered the sword in right next to the boat and before we could get a gaff in, he took off. Unfortunately someone accidentally bumped the drag up during this and he pulled the hook. We reset in the same spot and a couple minutes in we got a couple bites. I came tight on this fish and I could tell it was pretty big when it started taking line. It came up very slowly and kept swimming down deep. An hour into the fight, a couple mahi swam under the boat and we landed three of them. After well over two hours of fighting this fish, we brought it up and saw that it was a large bigeye thresher. Definitely disappointing but still a very cool fish.