We board our vessel for the two weeks boat trip deep in to the far out islands surrounding Nosy Be and I immediately notice that our boat captain Dave has several large trolling rigs and a few casting rods. ‘Sweet!’ I said to myself, I was skunked the one time I tried fishing in South Africa, maybe I can catch something in Madagascar. Sure enough Dave had planned to do some fishing. Previous to starting MRCI he had been doing fishing charters around the area and used the catamaran to reach some of the further locations. I had been wearing my blue Columbia fishing shirt, because that is what I do when it’s ~90F and blazing sun, and immediately started talking about fishing. Unfortunately he brought a limited selection of tackle and no one else had really done much fishing, but we were going to give it a go.

Pickaxe Barracuda

After a week I was in the circle of trust and he allowed my to take out the dinghy (a 15ft fiberglass w/30hp) to cast around the mangroves and other areas. Overall it wasn’t the most productive fishing trip, but it was totally relaxed. I caught a nice 3.5ft Pickaxe Barracuda while trolling one day early in the trip. I later rigged up a top water plug that I found on the boat and used that to catch another cuda and unfortunately lost a really nice Mangrove Snapper right at the boat. We switched it out for some stronger line and made a mission for big ‘GT’s’ aka Giant Trevally. We only got into a bunch of small ones outside of the Bararahumay River, but saw much bigger ones snorkeling.

Battling the Barracuda

One of the last nights Kara and I went out with Johan and an Englishman named Tom who had been keen to catch fish as well, since he had lots of experience salmon fishing in the UK. It was an incoming tide and about 4:30pm when we set out to try our luck at the Russian Bay inlet. We spotted some birds diving into the water near the channel drop off, I cast the plug into the bait fish. It was a near perfect cast to the periphery of the bundle and I pop the lure once, twice, and the third time a tuna-like fish comes rocketing at least 4 feet out of the water and the lure popped even higher. He ended up missing the lure entirely and ripped through the 60 pound test leader like it was a made of paper. Turns out that it had to be a 10-15lb juvenile Dogtooth Tuna that frequent the deeper reefs and drop offs.