It was joy when the Aernos 4000 reel started singing. In 3 steps, WT had reached the rod and yanked it out of the rod holder. As the bait was a much smaller tamban and not a medium sized selar like the previous time, I wondered what it could be. With a couple of pulls, we knew that it was... big fish on!
19 kg cobia
Before I continue with the story, let me just interrupt with a small piece of advice - when you know someone is fighting a big fish and your rod happens to be nearby, retrieve your line and remove your rod IMMEDIATELY! We were absolutely exasperated with this uncle who simply pulled his rod out, held it above his head and told us to carry on! *Faints...*
Ok, back to the fight... After making sure that the cobia wasn't going to dash under the kelong, WT passed me the rid to have a feel of what fighting a cobia was like. For a few minutes, I enjoyed the feel of a strong fish trying to run away and regained line bit by bit. True to its character, when the cobia was pulled back, it again tried to fight dirty. I quickly passed the rod back to WT as I was not confident of maneuvering the fish away from the kelong stilts.
One way of maintaining control of the fish was to keep the line as short as possible, and to do so we followed the fish along the side of the kelong from front to back. Having fought a 15kg cobia only 2 weeks ago, WT confidently subdued this 19kg one and an experienced kelong staff (明仔) gaffed it up with one quick stroke. Landed!
As we still have meat left over from the last cobia, we took only one third of this one and gave the rest to the kelong staff. Some pieces were also given to other anglers staying there. One of them made cobia sashimi on the spot and left it to chill. We were asked to partake the sashimi together with wine that night! Yums! :)
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