THE FLY LINE FLEW BACK THROUGH THE NIGHT TO LAND IN MY LAP.

PAVLOV’S GNOEFF Jazz Kuschke

It was a pretty dark night and we were spread out along the bank, fishing with cloud cover under a new moon. I heard the unmistakeable GNOEFFFF! sound of the kob smashing my fly before I felt the eat. There was a split second or two where this massive sound reverberated through the quiet, dark night and then the line in my hand went tight. I set the hook instinctively, a straight strip stick set. I think I was fishing a 20lb fluoro straight leader which was, I now know, obviously too light, because I set the hook too hard. Or, to really analyse it, I set and then held on for a split second too long when I should have let the fish have its head to start the fight. The result was that the tippet exploded and because the kob had eaten the fly so close to shore on the spring high tide in the depth of the night, the fly line flew back through the night to land in my lap. I don’t remember if I tied on another fly after that. I think I just packed up, sat down and sulked in my misery.

I run through what I could have and should have done differently over and over again. There was no squiggly tail on the leader where it parted. Was there a wind knot? Possibly, because I was throwing a Spongebob in the darkness so it could have twisted and that’s where it could have broken. But it was not a knot failure. It was just the line that parted.

I have caught smaller kob on the surface in the dark since then, but nothing near that size. Having heard the eat and felt how aggressively it ate, I keep thinking how big that fish would have been. I can still hear the gnoeff and feel the line ricocheting back at me. I think about it ALL the time. I still lose that fish and I think about what could have been, what should have been and what is and what was. That’s why it hurts so much. Brains like loops and that’s the fish that I lose again and again in my head.

SANDY CRACK Leonard Flemming

A lost fish that left in me a lot of pain was a GT on one of the Sudan atoll flats. I was in the perfect spot and everything happened textbook-style. A GT cruising on a big stingray’s back came straight to us. I placed the fly ahead of us, it ate, I hooked it and it raced across the sandflat. Then it popped the Airflo GT floating line. Jeff and I blanked on some of those days, it was a really tough trip to the tropics with pumping wind on some of the days and we had to stay on the mothership. It was one of those typically difficult-to-navigate trips where you only get to fish some days, on others you don’t even catch a fish. We bled. So, to lose a fish like that – which would have been my first big GT on foot – because of tackle failure really, really left a hole in my heart. Ja. I also realise that having been back to the tropics and to the Seychelles since, you don’t get many shots at GTs on sandflats, especially not big GTs over 85cm. After a while I realised that was one of the GTs that might have been the most memorable fish caught on a sandflat in my life. It’s a super-shit feeling and I don’t think I will ever get over it.