“I got the tap-tap. I put the reel in gear, made a couple of cranks and missed it. I dropped my live greenback mackerel back down, got the tap-tap again and thought it was a calico just messing with me. I put it in gear and reeled like hell,” says Mirage Revolution rider Brian Fagan.
It was no calico bass, a fish that averages a mere couple of pounds. For a long moment, he thought he had the bottom. Then the freight train started chugging and didn’t stop for 35 minutes.
“I was fighting the fish looking at an incredible sunrise. It was an ‘Oh God’ moment. I thought ‘This is unbelievable,’” Fagan recalls.
“When you can’t lift ‘em you think you have a protected black seabass. I didn’t even get my gaff out. When I got it at color I nearly soiled my shorts,” says Fagan, who was fishing in 100 feet of water at legendary La Jolla, California in spring 2016.
His fish was one of the gray ghosts of the kelp, a highly sought white seabass. He quickly stuck it. “I’ve launched at La Jolla some 300 times. When you’re on a kayak, fish look about five pounds heavier than when they’re on a scale,” he says.
Fagan was hoping it would break the fifty-pound mark, but he needn’t have worried. At local Hobie dealer Fastlane Sailing and Kayaking, the certified scale didn’t bottom out until it hit 74.2.
“I don’t fish for the records. I just love kayaking,” says Fagan. In the unofficial world of kayak records, he nearly scored one. There’s only one larger white seabass known to local ‘yak anglers, a 75-pounder caught by the pioneering Dennis Spike in May 2000. That fish was weighed in chunks – reportedly the scale used by Spike couldn’t handle the entire fish.
Surprisingly, there was nothing in the belly of Fagan’s fish.
“I don’t want to say a fish of a lifetime,” says Fagan, who is shooting for something bigger than this fish that stretched an even five feet long. So long, when he landed it the fish took up the entire cockpit, forcing him to paddle back in.
Fagan caught the fish on 65-pound Spectra with a 40-pound Seaguar Fluorocarbon leader. His baited his live greenback on a dropper looped circle hook.
“Once fishing kayaks came out I decided I’d never go on a boat again. On a kayak you’re your own captain. The peace and tranquility are more than worth the exercise, which is a benefit. At 56 I like the exercise,” Fagan says.
And how!
RELATED: Incredible 108.6-Pound Kayak Broomtail Certified as an All-Tackle Record by IGFA
