As our fishing season draws to a close here in the Bight and the snowbirds begin boarding flights equatorially-bound it seems fitting that we christen the AAR section with some Tahitian dreams. Mentally thaw yourself and enjoy the first installment of Atoll Call, a series following Tehotu Wong at home in a remote corner of French Polynesia.
During a recent trip to San Diego Tehotu offered to gather the local reef dwellers and tropical pelagics back home for a focus group to gauge their interest in some of our offerings and collect feedback. Equipped with a set of Pínchovies and prototypes to exhibit it didn’t take long to come across willing participants. First stop was the shoreline, focusing on the passes and points in the lagoon that bottleneck and concentrate bait, and consequently trevally. Having sighted a school of omilu (government name: bluefin trevally) cruising the beach he cast a Pínchovy just past them and demonstrated the finer aspects of the lure’s medium-fast retrieve with some short twitches to drive the point home. They were immediately enthralled and came back repeatedly for more samples, Tehotu having to beat them away with a jig stick.
With the shallows properly surveyed, a quick skiff trip to visit the inhabitants of the ledge outside the pass was next. Here the reef starts at a depth of 30 feet, sloping down to 130 feet before a radical 1000-foot drop-off. This drastic change in bathymetry means that in addition to the wide variety of exotic groundfish living in the coral a variety of pelagics patrol this zone, including dogtooth tuna, trevally (including giant), and even sailfish. The reef fish aren’t as excitable as their open water neighbors, so Tehotu slowed down the presentation to entice them out of their homes and up to the surface with a slow to medium retrieve mixed with some twitches to get more hang time in the strike zone, which proved irresistible.
He was even able to coax up a rare sight on the surface: an uku, or green jobfish. Tehotu’s first on topwater, a bucket list accomplishment for many diehard jig and pop anglers. By allowing the Pínchovy to sink a few feet between twitches of the rod tip he was able to overcome the grumpy uku’s aversion to climbing the water column.
The omilu worked their way into this session as well before it was cut short by a much larger and toothier participant from the very deep side stealing the lure. Difficult to confirm without visual confirmation, but all signs point to a dogtooth.
Moving out into deeper water it was time to upsize the presentation for larger game. For this Tehotu thought it appropriate to deploy a variation of our original prototype stickbait; a 140mm, 93g surface iron on steroids. After playing around with some skipjack he settled on a medium speed wind-and-pause retrieve. Pausing for a second or two every four to five cranks would send the lure on a long gliding descent off track before settling into a wobbling horizontal sink. Working the lure in this fashion would draw strikes on the pause or the initial sink, signaling these fish preferred a struggling or dying baitfish presentation. Upon encountering a school of ahi-grade tuna he decided to see if they shared the same opinion. A very large yellowfin quickly answered in the affirmative. This was no shibi, and unfortunately after 45 minutes hard fought on an 18k spin set up the fish was taxed by sharks, and the lure with it. Though with meat already in the box and data to report back to us at Bíghter HQ the day was not a total loss. We’ve been refining this prototype in various configurations for commercial release, we think you’ll find it quite enjoyable when it’s ready.
All lures having been lost brought the market research to a close, but the initial introduction was met with a warm welcome across the board from the locals, both aquatic and terrestrial. We've been delighted by their hospitality (and Tehotu's!), and hope you’ve enjoyed these highlights from his notes as much as we have. Yellowfin season is drawing near and we’ve restocked him with a fresh batch of reinforcements to greet them with. Stand by for the next Atoll Call.