I have always believed that big hooks catch big fish, but small hooks catch everything.
Coming from a trout fishing background, I know just how small of a morsel can be attractive to a large fish, whether a huge rainbow trout eating a microscopic snail or an oversized kahawai taking the tiniest slither of squid.
On this day, I had headed out to sea on a typical mission, but by all measures , it just hadn’t been going to plan. I paddled around for hours, trying every trick in the book to get a couple of fish to bite.
I was getting a little desperate to get something to happen, so a drift was set up along a reef. I got the angle just right and marked solid boulders overhanging onto some flat sand below.
I drifted until I got bites, and as soon as one rod was hooked up, the anchor went straight down. A couple of the target species, blue cod and tarakihi, were finally secured.
On a reef edge like this, a john dory could be a good prospect, so I whipped out a specially tied Sabiki to try for a small live bait; I use only the strongest trout hooks on this rig because they can be very attractive to many species, not just baitfish.
Soon, the wee hooks were getting all of the attention and were out fishing all of my other rigs, even with no bait! Intuiting what the fish wanted, I removed the other lines as I felt something silly was about to happen.
After several more tarakihi, the rig got a small tap—nothing out of the ordinary—, but when I lifted my rod tip, it loaded up harder than I could have expected. Line began to peel off the reel, sending me into a panic to reduce the drag. While these hooks are hard to straighten, they can and will pull out of fish due to their low surface area.
It was a back-and-forth battle, thankfully on a light rod that took a lot of the shock absorption. I would raise the fish off the bottom and then loose the line, and this went on for some time on the light drag.
It was huge head shakes and scorching off plenty of line runs reeling. My brain listed all the possible species before peering into the deep blue water. Right before my eyes rose the largest blue cod I had ever seen, and it was barely hanging off my microscopic hook.
It was very stressful leading the behemoth towards the net, as the hook threatened to pop off at any point. As if it was meant to be, the cod finally slid into my net, completing one of my most memorable captures in recent memory.
The cod pulled the scales down to 2.2kg and measured 51cm, a beast for my local area. Maybe I’ll have to put these hooks down more often?
