SHIT

GUNFIGHT AT THE Y-FRONT CORRAL Peter Coetzee

In 2013 I went on a Reef Raiders trip to Oman which is something No Boundaries puts together, generally with guys from the fishing industry. The plan was for me to try and get an enormous GT on fly. We headed off to the Hallaniyat islands off Oman. The scale of the Hallaniyats is quite deceiving. If you look at them they seem pretty walkable but, in reality, to get to the next bay some of the peaks you have to go over are 1 000ft or more. The shore break is enormous on some of those islands, so the guys would drop me in the water behind the shore break. I would jump in and swim through the waves to get to the beach. For the first few days it was a novelty, but by day eight, nine and 10 I was pretty gatvol of arriving on the island sopping wet and full of salt. Eventually I was packing everything in my backpack, jumping in the water in my boxers, swimming to the beach, using some fresh water to wash myself off, drying off and then putting my clothes back on.

I think I spotted my first GT a few days in on the islands. While chasing some parrotfish, I was standing on a rock looking down and I looked directly onto the back of an enormous GT of around 50 to 60kg sitting in a cleaning station where I could see the little cleaner fish going in and out of its gills. I lay on the rock just watching it and when that fish left, I tracked it for ages. It ran a very distinct route around the island. I thought OK, there’s something to that, so I sat there again and found another fish that came in. Then another. That was a breakthrough. On that day I saw 19 or so fish. But they were not really in a feeding mood. They were coming into that cleaning station. To get a decent shot my only option was to track further down that same stretch of beach to where there was a big dumping shore break. I knew eventually that a fish had to come in through that shore break.

The morning that I left, I had a proper discussion with Stu, a nutter with all sorts of GT tattoos all over his forearms. I had the prototype Wade reel with me and he shook his head and said, “Listen mate, if I was you, you would not catch me dead fishing a prototype reel. I’d go tried and tested.” At that stage I laughed it off, thinking, “It’s got cork and a drawbar drag. Nothing will go wrong. I will be fine.”

I had just been dropped off and had swum onto the beach that morning, so I was still in my undies. As I put all my kit down on the beach, I turned around and down a wave came an enormous GT. It surfed the wave all the way into the shore break and then just started kicking along in the suds. I thought, “Right, this is my chance.” I had a big tan semper on, tied on a circle hook. I ran ahead of it, dropped one cast a few metres ahead of it but, because the fish was in extreme shore break with lots of bubbles and sand, it must have had very obscured visibility. When I reset and cast again, I put the fly literally on its head like you should never do if it is clear water. Almost skull-crushed the thing. As I dropped the fly it jumped up and annihilated it. I set the hook and the fish ran out.