Today was a good and a bad day. The bad was dropping Tallen off at the airport in Puerto Vallarta for his flight home. :( Honestly, I was pretty sad saying goodbye and seeing him go. Other than that depressing note the rest of the day was pretty good. Not totally amazing, not necessarily outstanding, but pretty good. We woke up in Yelapa this morning, picked up anchor and headed across Banderas Bay toward Puerto Vallarta marina, about a 3 hour sail. Actually we motored the entire time as the bay was like glass, not a breath of wind. About an hour in we got a hook up on the rod and reel. At first it seemed like your normal pescado but it quickly became apparent that this fish was not your average Joe. We idled the motor back and put the boat in neutral like we normally do when we have a hook up but that wasn't enough. This thing was spooling the reel! I have 1000 yards of 150 pound test line and when I noticed that we were below half of that I had Karla steer the boat in his direction and start chasing him down to see if we could gain some line on him. No way! We were doing 4-5 knots toward the fish and he was still spooling line like we had a wimpy little trout rod. When he had spooled out well over 800 yards, that's about a 1/2 mile of line, we stepped up the pace trying to chase him down and finally we were at a stand still. Not gaining but not losing line to him. The kids took turns on the rod, but honestly, they couldn't hang on to it so I took over. At about 20 minutes into the fight we had gained back maybe 50-100 yards of the 800+ yards of line out there when the line went slack. Nothing! CRAP! We all wanted to see this beast. When we reeled in the line we discovered that the leader had been chafed and severed. He must have swallowed the entire lure and had the line coming out of his mouth and after so much time it finally chafed through. We were so bummed. It was by far the largest fish I have had on the line yet. I'm guessing that it was a large Yellow Fin Tuna, maybe 100+ pounds. So bummed to lose it.
After the lost fish we motored toward PV harbor, saw a couple of sea turtles along the way and eased on into the harbor. Filled the boat with fuel, which was a total of about 8 gallons of diesel after a week of cruising, not bad, had lunch, put Tallen in a taxi headed to the airport, washed the boat with fresh water and headed out to anchor in La Cruz about 9 miles away. Oh, we got a slip for 2 hours in PV while we had lunch and dropped off Tallen and the slip they put is in was crazy small. We tip toed in very slowly with barely enough room to turn the boat into the slip and once we were in we had about 1' leeway on either side of the boat. Sketchy!
On the way to La Cruz Karla and Aven were finally treated to a close whale siting as we had one breach about 50' off the starboard bow. Pretty cool stuff. What was crazy is that we were in like 25' of water and near PV which is the dirtiest part of the bay. We are now safely anchored outside of La Cruz and hope to pull anchor tomorrow morning and head back out to Punta de Mita as Aven wants to try to get a little surfing in. That's it for today kids. Ciao for now.
Bret, Aven, Karla
SV Liahona
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