I see this an old thread from 2009. Is anyone allowed to keep a cat on the beach at Ft. Lauderdale now?
It brings back a great memory of one day sailing between Hawaiian islands on a 24' cat. We trolled two lines out on the open ocean, and hit two fish at about the same time. The boat owner handed me the helm, and I feathered the boat up, between very large waves while he reeled the first one in. It was a very good sized Ahi, and he couldn't close the large cooler lid after he put the beautiful fish in it.
As he was reeling in the second one, the line suddenly went slack. He jumped up, and started yelling, screaming, and cussing in Hawaiian, to the shark that had taken the second one, which was obviously much larger than the first one.
Since the cooler was already too full, he decided not to fish any more that day, because we still had most of the way to go from Molokai to Oahu before the Sun went down.
It was one of those days where you look behind you, and all you can see is a very large wave with two boat wakes going down it. We met a school of Dolphin headed the other way, like two planes meeting in the sky, but they turned around, and stayed in between the hulls, and all around us for a good ten minutes. There were babies along side their Mothers, and the largest Male would go back and forth between the fronts of the hulls. He would peel out below, and come out near the top of the wave behind us, slide down the wave, and go between the hulls until he needed to come back up for air again. I think they were having as good of a time as we were.
We were going very fast when the fish struck, and when the Dolphins were playing with us.
That boat had a row of rope clutches in front of the tramp. Under the levers to the clutches was a single hinged bar. I asked him what that bar was for. Kimo said it was the Panic Bar, and dumped everything.
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