FOR ALMOST TWO WEEKS I SPENT EVERY SINGLE DAY TRYING TO GET THAT FISH.

I tried to keep it in the suds, but it was huge and there was no chance. It ran out and, funnily enough, I felt it immediately wrap me around a rock but then, luckily, it came the other way around that rock and it was off. The fight felt like it lasted forever, but was probably only a few seconds and I had managed to beat him. He’d stopped running once he came free from the rock. I was fishing a Rio Leviathan so I knew I had the strength there and was holding on like all hell. I had the drag locked up as much as possible and I was holding the spool too. I would walk backwards, retrieve a little bit of line, walk backwards, retrieve a bit of line. The fish at this point was just behind the shore break so I was now getting ready to try and land it. It had one or two kicks left in it. By this stage I no longer had to hold the spool of the reel. This was pre-Hardy Fortuna days when you had to rely on palming and full drag, etc. So I would pull the rod up, retrieve, pull the rod up, and repeat.

What happened next was a ridiculous series of events that happened so quickly. As I was reeling in, the fish kicked and I immediately felt the reel reverse wind, very quickly, twice, backwards – vhup-vhup! I thought, “Fuck what was that?” Then, “It was nothing, keep going.” The fish had obviously sensed there was a weak point so it kicked again. The reel gave a few more reverse winds and the next thing the reel just let go and went into full free spool. The fish was right there next to me and I knew that if it started swimming it would be game over. Stupidly, I tried to grab the spool and the only thing on that reel to hold onto is the handle and the spool itself. I had been holding the drag like that, but now it was a different story as I did not have the drag to assist me. I basically had a reel with no drag while trying to hold a GT of 50kg+. I was holding as much as I could, but every time this thing would give way. In hindsight, what I should have done was drop the rod, grab the fly line and hand-line the fish in, but I wasn’t thinking clearly and the next time it went around it hurt my hand really badly. I looked down and my whole finger and the base of my thumb was already pitch black. The fish ran, ran, ran and just as it got to the point where the backing was, I looked up and saw that the foot of one of my snake guides had come off. I watched as, almost in slow motion, the loop on my backing went up and hit the foot of the snake guide. It did not cut the line, but I had a loop connected to a hollow core piece of Dacron and it caught the Dacron and basically just sleeved the entire thing off the fly line. Phooop! I dived into the water and tried to grab it, but the fly line was just out of reach so I just watched underwater as the fish swam away with the remnants of my fly line.

When Stu and the rest of the guys came to pick me up, he took one look at me and my hand and said, “You lost an enormous fish, didn’t you? The reel failed, didn’t it?”

For almost two weeks I spent every single day trying to get that fish, so losing it like that absolutely destroyed me. It took me years to get over it. I still try to not think about it at all. For all the meditation in the world it still breaks my heart.