Christmas Island Feb 2012

Sorry for the long delay in getting a report up.  I came home to a huge deadline and have been working long days since I returned.  Anyways, here's the report ...

The scenery of the Christmas Island is absolutely amazing.  Our first glimpse of it was this.  It's a long journey to Christmas Island, one that involved an overnight layover in Honolulu.  Come the next morning, it's 3 hour hop down to Christmas.



It wasn't long before we were on the ground.  Those rooms behind the chainlink is customs.





It wasn't long before we were unpacking the kayaks we had shipped down.  We've been shipping brand new kayaks down since November.  Our arsenal included a couple of Ocean Kayak Trident 13's, a Hobie Adventure, and a couple of Diablo Adios SUPyaks.  We also were equipped with Kokatat Bahia Tour PFD's, and Werner paddles.  Lots of unpacking and rigging.  But soon enough we'd be doing this!



Had a few lures to unpack too.  We had a few lures from Ocean Tackle International, Big Hammer, Brad's Bay Bombers, Williamson, and Yozuri.   We were to do a lot of different fishing styles this week.  We spent a lot of time tossing big 6", 4 ounce poppers for Giant Trevally (Ulua).  But we also jigged for an assortment of snappers and groupers, tossed flies for bonefish, troller rapalas for Bluefin Trevally (Omilu) and Papios, ripping Big Hammers for more Uluas, fishing damashi/sabiki for assorted reef fish, tossing swimmer across the reef for whatever would bit.



The excitement was high and we could hardly wait until the next morning.

-Alllen

We had a lot of exploring to do.  Kayaks were something new on this island.  Many locals had never seen them, but they did use a lot of these outrigger canoes.  The locals would launch from the beach and paddle about 1/4 mile offshore.  They would tie off to buoys and fish the traditional method of wrapping chum/rocks in leaves, and sinking them down before yanking the lines to release the chum with a hook in a chunk of fish.



We watched them pull in a few of these.



We had a few options available to us.  Some days we load some kayaks on lager motorized outriggers and other days we'd load the kayaks on trucks to get to other launch points.





Trolling the reef edge we'd get into all sorts of fish including these beautiful bluefin trevally.



-Allen

It wasn't all fun and play though.  The first week we spent a lot of time working a story for Hemispheres Magazine.  Hemispheres is the inflight magazine for United/Continental.  They have a readership of 13M people per month.  The article should come out early this summer.  Because of the article we spent a lot of time posing for picture.  Sometimes it seemed like we spent more time setting up for photos than actually fishing.  Not all bad considering the scenery.









-Allen

It may look calm in many of these pictures, however the week we were there, the wind was up, blowing a pretty steady 15-18.  We had a couple of days early in the week when the swell was pumping too (see the previous surf fishing picture).  We'd have some windows of good weather in the lee, but often times we had to resort to fishing from the outrigger, or pulling up on a flat and wade fishing.  We didn't get much time to fish offshore much, but we were able to concentrate on quite a few good Ulua, unfortunately not as much off the kayaks as we would have liked.  Some days we're fishing until your arms fell off days and we probably got 70-80 or more Ulua over 2 weeks.









We did see a number of brutes though.



We dubbed this particular spot the Pancake Flat.

-Allen

Speechless!   The pics of the Trevally are amazing. 

Thanks for sharing your trip.

willbd

Wow that looks amazing.  Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like in incredible trip.  Hemispheres is one of my favorite in flight magazines.  I will try have my friends look out for the article if they are flying. 

Wow.  Just wow.  That last Ulua is an amazing beast. 

Those are some epic Ulua!  They must have been smoking your drag washers.

Nice looking swell too!  Dang but I'm jealous!

-Spot-

What can I say? Beautiful. Looks like a great trip. Did ya have fun? Duh..........

Hey Allen?
How did the Adios handle in the surf and surrounding waters compared to the T13's and Addy?

Looks like an amazing trip. Thanks for sharing.

Hey Allen?
How did the Adios handle in the surf and surrounding waters compared to the T13's and Addy?

I'm guess similar to a sheet of plywood....

Wow. Just amazing Allen! That is some beuatiful scenery. Never been much of a world traveller so it's nice to live a little vicariously through yours...