WOW! Angler Catches SwordFish With Fly Rod
While fly fishing from shore in the Maldives, a fly-fishing guide still can’t believe he landed a
huge swordfish.
Immediately following the release of the photos, skeptics started calling it bull****. They showed an angler holding a hefty swordfish while holding a fly rod in front of him.
In the post, Thomas Paulsen, a Maldives flyfishing guide, describes how he spotted, teased, hooked, and landed the big swordfish.
Flying a swordfish with a fly rod is almost impossible, but it is incredible to accomplish it from the beach.
Of course, the photos and story are real. Paulsen laughs when people question his story, stating, “Some people are always going to be a pain in the ass.”
Paulsen is a professional guide at GTFlyfishing, specializing in catching giant trevally from coral beaches in the middle of the Indian Ocean. His day job is incredible, he doesn’t need to fabricate fish tales for internet popularity.
In general, Paulsen says the reaction has been positive, with praises and people congratulating him coming from all corners of the fishing world. But he still says, “I can’t believe what happened.”
In his spare time, Paulsen fished the edge of a coral reef, looking for fish swimming nearby. “About 150 yards off the reef crust, the water depth drops 3,000 feet,” he says. A school of marlin was spotted two days earlier from shore. Billfish hunt in this area frequently.
Seeing a big fish in the distance, Paulsen investigated. “I saw a bill come out of the water and I thought it was a sailfish,” he said.
Paulsen used a Winston Air Salt 9-foot, 12-weight rod with a Hatch Finatic 9 Plus reel and a Winston Air Salt 9-foot, 12-weight rod. A custom black and green fly on an 8/0 Gamakatsu hook was tied on a reel loaded with 350 yards of 80-pound braided line underneath RIO GT 475 gram line and 9 feet of Momoi Hi-Catch fluorocarbon.
When the fish moved closer to casting range, Paulsen made three casts with no luck. On the fourth cast, the fish turned and saw the fly, it zeroed in on his fly and attacked. Paulsen set the hook and the huge billfish took 200 yards of his spool parallel to the reef. He said, “I wouldn’t have been able to stop it if it had escaped into the deep.
The fish turned toward the reef and swam into shallow water, flailing helplessly in a shower of spray. Has Paulsen got closer to the fish he finally saw his catch.
Paulsen called a friend over to help him subdue the green swordfish in knee-deep water on a sharp coral reef. “By now, my adrenaline was pumping and I almost fainted,” Paulsen recalled.
For any angler, catching a swordfish with a fly rod is an incredible achievement. Landing the fish from the shore requires so many factors to go right. Paulsen’s catch weighed 102 pounds and was 5 feet long from the tip of its chin to its tail. No gambler would bet on those odds.
According to Paulsen, this is the craziest thing that has ever happened to him in 40 years of fishing. He does not expect to repeat or even surpass this feat. “I cannot understand the tremendous amount of luck,” he said.
Sources: Sportsfishingmag
