SAILING & FISHING_ Steps to Self-Sufficiency at Sea - Free Range Sailing Ep 187

There's Pascy, hard at work keeping this properly reefed. We're going to try and get up to Norwegian Bay, so we've got somewhere to explore if we get shut down by the wind and make that a little bit more close to Exmouth, because we're going to pull in there before we go further north. And there goes a fish. We'll see how Pascy handles it. Good day, everyone. This week we're continuing our cruise up the W.A. coast, but we're doing an episode that's slightly different to normal. It is a little bit different. People have consistently asked for ages, and we haven't ignored them, we just haven't got around to it. Just to talk a little bit about trolling under sail, because in this episode we were running pretty long provisions, but it doesn't really matter. We sort of don't buy a lot from the shops in terms of meat, do we? That's right, yeah. We rely heavily on what we can get from the ocean for our meat. Yeah, a lot of it's spearfish, but a lot of it is when we're sailing, when we're under sail and going places. If you've watched a few of our episodes now, you'll know that we generally troll while we sail, and we very rarely stop when we actually catch a fish. So we're gonna have a little bit of a look at that in this episode. In the last episode we caught a long-tailed tuna at Cape Cuvier. It was beautiful, really beautiful fish. The following few days we really were quite empty in the fridge after that long-tailed tuna, so we were trolling every day just to catch fish, and we were eating fish every meal, and yeah, we had a really great time fishing up that part of the coast. Normally we just fish with a hard-bodied lure, and I know there's a really wide selection of lures out there that you can choose. What we never really put out is large, pusher-style lures with a big skirt on them. Some people might wonder why that is, Pascy? It's because we're not really chasing, we're not game fishing, and we're not chasing any big billfish. It's a hell of a fight that you can pick to get a marlin on a 30-footer. Yeah, especially underway. We have accidentally caught a sailfish in the gulf, even just with this setup, so it's something to be wary of, but yeah, we're not targeting those fish at all. And I caught a marlin. Keep pulling it up, pull it up. Oh my God. No, no, it's not a marlin, it's a sailfish. A sailfish. Oh, it didn't take to the air though, did it? No. Just because we run this, it doesn't mean we don't occasionally get big fish all the same. We've had some honkers on board. Yeah, my very first trip with Troy, we, it was the biggest fish I've caught with him on this boat, and well, you brought it in. It was a 25 kilo, roughly, Spanish mackerel. It was huge. It's probably the biggest mackerel that I've brought onto Mirrool. It was lucky that we were going into Broome, because we couldn't have eaten it all ourselves. Oh, I just wanted to add before we get on with the episode, there is lots of fishing in it, but it didn't all happen in one day. We were sailing up the Ningaloo Coast for a week, and this was just us filling our fridge that week, and that was the most exciting stuff, getting more fresh food and bringing in fish. Yeah, so here goes the show. Sailing and fishing. Wind that drag up a little bit more, so it's off strike drag, that's it, and now pump him up. We'll try not to take any leeway off our sails. As we've mentioned in the past, we like to keep sailing at speed when we catch a fish. This reduces the likelihood of our fish getting stolen by the sharks that like to keep pelagic fish company, and minimizes sail handling while we're busy trying to bring the fish on board. Once the fish is sufficiently tired, we gaff it and stun it with a hard fish bat before bringing it on board. Where possible, we try to remove the lure before bringing the fish into the cockpit as well. A large, powerful fish with a set of hooks as well as teeth in a small cockpit demands respect. Turn aside, I need to clear room into there. Watch this lure. There's Pascy's tuna, we saw the fight. She's got swelling arms now, she looks like Popeye with those forearms. I feel a bit like I've got lactic acid buildup. I feel like I had a workout. Sounds like that's just the right size tuna for us, you know, like about an arm's length tuna. So we'll have to, we'll give it a scrub. So I'm just gonna take the anti-foul off this tuna. They've got a pretty decent amount of slime on them, and we like to scrub our fish, you know, before we take the fillets off them. And the reason being is it makes them easier to handle, you know, they're not slimy, not slippery. And also when we're making the cuts, we don't put the slime down into the flesh. A few years ago, we met a fellow in the Whitsundays, his channel's Sail to Spear, and we were talking about it, and he made a lot of sense when you're processing meat. You don't want to introduce the outside bacteria and stuff like that, which that slime's got lots of, into your food, because we found before we were scrubbing it, sometimes if we'd had the fish for a while, it would get a bit of a flavor to it. We put it down to that slime. It's either a yellowfin or a big-eye tuna. We just have to ID it, and we'll get back to you on that a bit later. I'm going with a juvenile yellowfin. Juvenile yellowfin? Because the length of the pectoral fins. Yep. And there is a bit of a notch here, and those belly stripes are a little bit curved. Yeah. So is the notch, do you remember that the notch at the end in between the two? Do you wanna just show us that? So see how he's got a notch in his tail there? Yeah. Right there, and it's built up. Not only that, like his pectoral fin, when we hold it down in its little groove, see how the tip just extends a bit past this fin? Oh, is that another feature, is it? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Okay, cool. And those belly stripes, which are juvenile, you know, they're not bars, they're curved. Yeah. So if they were bars, I would say that this is a big-eye tuna. A juvenile of these, the big-eye tuna in the yellow fin is anything under 120 centimeters. Anything under a meter 20 is considered juvenile. They don't necessarily have a size limit on tuna here in Australia. Like, we've got a pretty good population of these things up and down the coast, and they're very aggressive feeders, and they do quite well. But this is about the size that we like. Really big tuna would be hard for us to store, and we wouldn't wanna waste any, because these fish are amazing, they're really good food. So, we're really happy when we get a fish about this long, yeah, my arm. That's like. Seven? Eight, nine kilos? Eight, nine kilos. So that's a good amount of food for us, you know, like. Once it's processed, it'll be about four kilos of fish. Yeah, well, you don't get a lot of meat out of the head on these. So, it's not too bad. It'll still be hard in these conditions, processing fish, but we've gotta do it. Every now and then, you know, like, everything just combines to make those larger waves. Whoa, that's pretty good, right on the spine. Occasionally, while I'm processing the fish, you'll see me pause and brace. After years of living on a boat, people tend to get a bit of a second sense that a jarring motion, or a jolt, is on the way, by the way the ship is moving. I'd film without a camera, but I'm feeling a little bit queasy, so. Yeah, sure. You've done your part, you've got him on board. Oh, it's so hard, it's warm, and floppy. Yeah, this would be a lot easier if this fish was cold. Good order in there. Nice. What are you gonna do? Close haul, going five knots. Five and a half knots. We've had a few tuna challenges, haven't we? We just don't have the time up our sleeve to heave two to do it, though, so. Oh, wow, pretty good. Not too bad. Yeah. Lonely bit was a bit in the tail, but. We'll do the usual. So you can see, then, that I cut that fillet into bits that my knife is as long or longer than, and the reason being is tuna, you need to have this bloodline out, and there's a set of bones through there. So I just like to, I haven't really found a better way of doing it for us that gives us nice-sized logs for consumption, and it's easy to follow, and take the skin off just by going down and then cutting out towards the skin. This one's got a little bit of dressing to do, but not too bad. We can do that when it's cold. Yeah. Wow, they're perfect, those long stuff. Not bad, are they? Mm-hmm. So what we found with tuna is it's really important to get it as cold as possible so we don't overload our containers in the fridge. We just do one layer and give a nice air space so they can chill really quickly, because that's the key to a good product. We don't have a freezer or ice slurry that we can put our fish in, so we have to do it this way. Yeah, that's for sure. Good fish. Are you serious? Or is it weed? No, it's a fish. I think it's a twiddle. That was like. Outside the reef, baby. Yep, we're outside the reef, and that was about a minute. Hooting along at six knots. That's a natural, though. Oh, cool. An alternative rig that lots of yachts use to fish when underway is some sort of very heavy line with a bungee cord as a shock absorber to make a hand line. I've used this system myself to avoid slowing down while sailing, but having said that, changing to an overhead outfit and monofilament line has vastly improved our strike rate and not lost us many fish. Okay, now some people will be wondering what's the outfit that we use, and this is not a paid endorsement in any way. We use the Shimano TLD 25. Because I've had this for seven years of constant use, everything's worn off it. Very simple. So, at the moment, that's just in free, okay? It can spin. There's a little strike alarm, that's what that click, and you can turn that off. What that is is just so, if you're sitting around and a fish takes it, you actually hear it. That's its only function. It's also, its other function is for people to use it and just leave it going in it, just to annoy everyone around them. So you can just turn that off and fish quietly. The drag on this, which is the friction that the fish has to fight against, is controlled by this lever. These aren't buttons, these are just stops, all right? And this button is a button, but the lever hits it. We don't have to do anything and it just puts everything into free spool. This button up here is to act as a strike stop. So at that point, you know that the drag is set to a given value, and that's for when you're trolling and the fish hits the lure, you want it to be able to pull against that without snapping the line. We like to set that at between 20 and 25%, you know, at one-fifth to one-quarter of the breaking strain. This breaking strain of this line is 20 kilograms. So I set it for just a little bit under five kilograms because it's getting old. This nylon line is seven years old as well. It's been in the sun for a little while. So far, it's still hanging in there pretty well. And to set that, I like to use, because I'm half Austrian, I like to use an actual little scale. We've got this because we've got a Dyneema rig and this is a 300 kilo crane scale, so I can use that for a lot of things. And one of them is setting my reel up. So we'll just set the strike drag to a quarter to one-fifth of the breaking strain. And, you know, this will all be ready to rock and roll. Ready? Adjust this a touch. So that's our drag set, all right? So that's the strike drag now and I know that it's a set value and I'll check that every few weeks. And certainly, about four or five times a year, I'll pull this reel apart and lubricate it and I overhauled the bearings quite recently. What you can do is, if you're fighting the fish and it's really going for it, if you set that to, you know, like that value I said, you can push that button in and actually increase the drag on the fish all the way up to there and you won't break it. So that's a nice thing to do. The other thing that I'll just mention quickly before we get on with the rest of the video is these little clips here are to, you know, help to attach a harness for if you're fighting big fish. But we use it by, we have this brass piston clip and we always put a lanyard on our rods, okay? Because it won't be, you know, it won't be the first time that one of these rods, the rod holders that we put it into quickly spin or something untoward happens and that rod can slip off into the deep. You lose a fishing rod and some poor fish is swimming around with an overhead outfit attached to him. So that's it. Measure the drag, make sure you secure your rod and we're pretty much ready to go. We'll just attach a lure to this and see how things go. Back to catching fish. One of the highlights of our trip up the Ningaloo Coast was the many humpback whale encounters during their migration north. Here we see a female trying to attract a suitor and since this episode is a fishing episode, we'll just mention that in the past we have found pelagic fish in the vicinity of Wales. Right on that contour, eh? Yeah, I was looking how it got really deep on the chart. No, no, it wasn't that it got deep, we came out of the deep and there was like a little spur that 50 meter ground went out like that because we were coming in to see those whales. The dolphin fish must have been hanging just off that edge. She's hanging with us now. It's very exciting because I've never eaten dolphin fish before, so yeah, I've always wondered what it tastes like and now I, oh no, let's get a look at it. The color's starting to go. The color's already gone. The blue dots are there. Yeah. All right, as we said before, we use hard-bodied lures like this thing. This has been pretty popular. It's got a couple of bunch of wounds in it. At the moment, so this is a bibb lure. That bibb makes it dive down. Pretty happy with it, pretty robust construction. If we were in southern parts of Australia where you didn't have things like mackerel with razor-sharp teeth, we could just use nylon, you know, nylon fishing line straight to that, but up here we do have to use single-strand wire to get around those teeth that I'm talking about. So it doesn't really have to be that long. I like to make it probably about as long as my arm. Just by forming a loop in it and putting a series of twists, we can secure that and make a nice eye for the clip on the line to secure to, and we'll also put it on this lure. It's really, really straightforward, and I'll just walk you through it. I don't know, what are we gonna use now? Thumb to finger? Look, just a reasonable amount. Just bend it round and make a nice, tight loop in it, and it's gonna wanna spring apart, so you really do have to hang onto it. Once you get that wire and hold it roughly 90 degrees to itself, you can, if it's a bit tough to hold with your fingers, you can get some neat little pliers. Make sure that the two legs are at 90 degrees and give them a twist. Keeping those legs at a 90-degree angle to each other, just keep giving it a few twists, you know? Four, five is plenty. If you keep those, if you keep that 90-degree angle fairly consistent, you'll get a really nice-looking finished job, and it looks nice because it's very consistent and very strong. On the final twist at this stage, you wanna bring that round, and just by maneuvering your fingers, keep that 90 degrees, but one of them is now in line with that, and one of them is sticking out to the side. Okay, it's just a little bit of practice. It's not a difficult thing to achieve. Once it's like that, holding your finger on there, and just spin that round, but just keep it at 90 degrees. So what you've got now is a series of just twists, and if you do another five of these that just go straight around like that, that completely locks it. So far, you have a fairly nice, professional-looking job of haywire twists and barrel rolls. Now, some people I've seen, what they'll do now is they'll get their pliers and they'll cut that off right there, and you know what it leaves? Is a razor-sharp little tag there, and as you're bringing it up to get a fish or whatever, you invariably put nicks and whatever in your hands. It's not very safe. But if you just bend this into a little crank handle, see how that's done? By getting your pliers now and hanging onto those barrel rolls that you've got, you can grab that little handle, and just like you were about to crank a car, okay, imagine there's a car here, cranking over an engine, bend it that way. See how neatly that broke off? And now, there's no sharp edge, okay? It won't cut you. Very quickly, at this end, I'll just show you what happens when you cut it. So that one, I hurried that a bit so it's a bit less professional-looking. But if you get snips and you snip that off, that's the end result. See that little tag? And trust me, because I've cut that with metal, that is sharp. It's really, really sharp. So you can be fighting a fish or whatever, forget totally about that thing and get a nice one to two millimeter deep cut straight through there. And they fill up with salt and they just make your life a misery when you're cruising. All I have to do to secure that to the lure is, of course, just bend it through that ring and repeat the process. It's exactly the same. There's nothing to it at all. Except now that you've got a lure ring, that helps you actually hang on to it. So that is ready, and we'll go and attach that to the rod. And that'll protect us from getting bitten off. Lure, fishing rod. I've used a double here. The internet and books are loaded with all sorts of ways to tie these knots, and I encourage you to find the one that you like the best. But yeah, all this goes on now is just a clip and I will say ball bearing swivels, okay? That's what you really wanna do. You're actually rigging. You're rigging for fish catching at the moment and it pays to use good gear. So ball bearing swivels when you're mucking around these big pelagics, they need to be strong. But that is essentially what we're looking at. Bite protection, lure, a nice snap so we can interchange them at will. A swivel, you know, in case there's any spinning or the fish start to spin. A double line, which gives us, like if one of these breaks, we've got a backup. It also gives us some elasticity as a shock absorber, which is why I actually like nylon line instead of braid. I actually like to stretch in my trolling gear. And I'll put that there. Put a lanyard on. When we go fishing, we always like to have a lanyard so it can't go overboard. And it would normally go right there and we'd go sailing. One thing to mention is that we always have the trolling rod on the windward side of the boat when we're sailing. And that's so we don't end up leaning downhill when fighting a fish. Also, the leeward tendency of a yacht through the water can potentially guide our line into the self-steering gear. It's a tuna. One of the drawbacks of trolling is that catch and release of pelagic fish has a low survival rate. That means even if the fish is not a species we are targeting, if we catch it, we eat it. Yeah, we have to eat that one. Good job. That's beautiful. All fish can be well bled by simply cutting the throat latch but tuna benefit from also putting a one inch deep cut through the line that marks where their pectoral fin lays against their body. Underneath here, there is a long, blood-rich region that they use to regulate their body temperature. Ready? Offshore fish ID cards? Yep. Skipjack tuna. Three to five stripes along the belly? Yep. Three or four? We got four. Basically had the tuna sampling trip so far, haven't we? We've had longtail, skipjack, yellowfin. When we were down in southern WA, we had albacore and striped bonito. Now we've got skipjack. So that's the fishing. Now what we like to do when we're knocked off for the day and we've got enough fish in the fridge, if you read the Shimano manual for these reels, what they tell you to do is that strike drag, put that back on, and take that all the way so it's in free spool and that eases up pressure on all the springs and everything like that and the drag in there. And that'll leave that free to spin but that little clicker will be just enough resistance so it won't overrun. If you've got really nice bearings and maintained it, it's very easy just to walk by, hit that, and then it'll spool and you'll get overruns. The other thing we do, water's really precious on Mirrool. We don't have a lot of it. And it's probably pretty good for your reel not to hit it with a hose and force salt and other contaminants inside the reel. There's a lot of recommendations just to use a fresh water spray bottle and just hose everything down really well. This is starting to run out of water, isn't it? What we can do is just where the spool is and all that line, I usually give that a nice bit of a flush as well so I don't get salt crystals building up inside and as the line compresses. We'll let that dry. You can spray a little bit of whatever water dispersant you want, WD-40 or whatever one you favor. What's it called? What's our fish lotion called? Basky? Mako oil. Yeah, we like to spray a bit of Mako oil from time to time. We don't want to spoil it too much. And there you go. All ready for another season of hard service. It's looking pretty good for a seven-year-old beating up reel. That looks pretty, actually. I didn't, not too bad presentation. Good sashimi. Mahi-mahi gets the. The dolphin fish or mahi-mahi? Yeah. That's really great. Like that's quite firm. I thought it'd be a bit mushy because it's fast growing. I don't know why. But sort of like soft wood and hard wood. But this is really good. And that's the skipjack we caught. So we bled that well so it's not super, super red but obviously it's redder than yellowfin. And I guess that's got a bit more of a minerally flavor than some of the yellowfin tunas and some of the top grade ones. But we still really like it. And that red color, when we cook it, it'll go white like chicken. You can pretty much treat it like chicken but when it's fresh like that, that is the way to go. This is both our first time eating mahi-mahi raw and we really like it. I'm gonna tuck in because it's only good cold. What's this? You just buried it all. Eat it all. Yeah. Look at that. And so this is, we had some sort of pretty mushy seaweed packet. I opened it to make sushi about a week ago but it didn't, it went stale. And the really good thing to do is to put some oil in a fry pan. I used ghee, leftover ghee from cooking fish yesterday. Put some oil in the fry pan and fry it up. Seaweed crackling. And it's delicious. It's crunchy. Can you hear that? Troy's eating it. It's crunchy. Thanks everyone for sticking with us through the episode. A special thanks going out to everyone. Well, our normal supporters as usual. We always really appreciate it. But everyone that showed such a great response to our t-shirt campaign and got one of our t-shirts. Really, really great. It was an unexpectedly good response. Yeah. Wasn't it? Yeah, we're really pleased that you're enjoying your new shirts. So for everyone who's contributed in some way or bought a shirt, you've helped to keep Free Range Sailing independent, not annoying you with adverts. And all the rest of it. So just from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for supporting Free Range Sailing. Yeah. If you enjoyed the video, hitting the like button helps to get this video suggested to like-minded people. Thanks in advance and see you next time.