Special feature: Deep Trouble, the article that appeared in Sport Fishing December 2011 issue

Doug Olander, chief editor of Sport Fishing Magazine has given me the permission to post in the blog "Deep Trouble", the article that appears in the latest edition of SF in December. Is quite a complete feature with lots of information for the jigging enthusiasts and I'm honoured to have participated in it. To read it just follow the link: ARTICLE

Have a look at the Sport Fishing Magazine web site as well.

Thanks a lot to Doug, Sport Fishing Magazine and Bonnier Corporation

Iguela, Gabon. Surf fishing at sunset

Iguela, Gabon. Surf fishing at sunset, a photo by Nicola Zingarelli on Flickr.

If you notice, this image has been cropped on the horizontal side. The reason is that I didn't have a tripod with me on that trip, and had to put the camera on top of the cooler, and a corner of it was visible in the shot. The sunset on the western coast of Africa is pretty dramatic, and even though the colors have been saturated they're not far from what we could see every evening.

www.nicolazingarelli.com
www.caranx.net

Back to the Tropics

Off I go my friends, back to the tropics. It is going to be a humid and sweaty week, sounds awful yet is great, I missed it big time.

4 guys plus myself, fishing unknown waters, with not a single clue about what we can expect even though, expectations, as usual, are pretty high. Fishbase made us droll with all the sport fish available, and if only 50% of what they say is true and those species are available in decent numbers we're set.

This is an exploratory trip, probably will be mostly dedicated to jigging but we will carry popping gear too, just in case. We have 5 days to scout the waters around the island, not much time, yet enough to get an idea.

I hope I will come back with some good pictures and a decent story for the blog, keep posted !

PETA and the Sea Kittens - Editorial in Sport Fishing

For those guys who don't read Sport Fishing, I tell you you're missing something. This is the editorial that Doug Olander, the Editor in Chief wrote in one of the latest issue and I think is really worth reading.

Thanks Doug, keep up the great work!

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STROKE YOUR SEA KITTEN TODAY!

I just love PETA. No — I really do. (That of course is the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, though I know a few anglers who insist that they belong to a different PETA -- People Eating Tasty Animals). Those folks are just so zany and entertaining, and we can always use a good laugh these days.
I mean, I was still chuckling over PETA’s recent campaign to persuade major ice-cream manufacturers to substitute human breast milk for cow’s milk (as Dave Barry likes to say, I am not making this up), when along comes a campaign to “Save the Sea Kittens.”
Being a typically uninformed ravager of the sea like me, you’re probably wondering what a “sea kitten” might be. True, it’s not exactly intuitive. “Sea kitten” replaces that archaic term for the finny things we pursue — formerly known as “fish.” (No, I’m not making this up, either.)
Why? Turning logic inside-out in its typically quaint fashion, PETA explains the need to stop using the word “fish” because that “name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through [a fish’s] head.” (I don’t know about you, but that pretty accurately describes all the fish I catch.) “Who,” PETA asks, “could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?”
Who, indeed? If you want some nice tackle, cheap, see the ad I just posted on Craig’s List for all my rods and reels. I had no problem mindlessly slaughtering fish by the hundreds, as of course all fishermen strive to do, but now that it’s come to hurting poor sea kittens ... my God! What sort of brute do you take me for?
PETA’s website describes, for example, a poor sea kitten that spent years “watching her friends and family being hooked through the mouth and dragged into a harsh, alien world.” The upshot? Watching that “have [sic] driven her mad with grief.” Think about it, you swine: How many fish have you driven mad with grief?
And PETA points out that the name change will ensure no one buys fish to eat ever again. Eating fish is bad enough, but who in his right mind would order a fillet of sea kitten? (Just as well, since PETA reminds us that, “All fish flesh today is contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins.” In fact, “fish flesh is just about the most polluted thing that humans put into their bodies”! Maybe that explains my recent green glow in dark rooms.)
And for you spiritual anglers, note that PETA suggests you can still get right with God by giving up your evil ways, as it is “un-Christian to torture and kill fish” (if you practice any other faith, you’ll need to consult PETA for a ruling on torturing sea kittens).
In four years, we might have a sea kitten in a large tank occupying the White House — with any luck. After all, says PETA, sea kittens are “cuter and smarter than the president of the United States.”
I now call upon my fellow sea kitteners who still insist upon catching poor marine felines to at least stroke them before setting them gently in the fish box — sorry, in the sea-kitten box. Why? Well, duh! “Like their surface-dwelling cousins, the land kittens [not including a couple of Siamese cats I know], sea kitties enjoy being petted. Their lack of arms makes it difficult for them to pet back, but they often gently rub against each other as a sign of affection,” PETA informs us. Sure, I love to stroke freshly gaffed wahoo as much as the next guy, because I know how that pussycat with razor-lined jaws appreciates it. And now I can better appreciate gazing starry-eyed at scads in a livewell, rubbing and purring in their big love fest that, in my ignorance, I somehow failed to notice all these years.
It’s time you started to realize how adorable all sea kittens are. “Sea kittens talk to each other through squeaks, squeals and other low-frequency sounds that humans can only hear through special instruments. Most ichthyologists — scientists who specialize in sea-kitten biology — agree that this is just about the cutest thing ever.” For example, last week I watched a mako shark bite off the tail of a swordfish, disabling it and dooming it, and then swim off. That was so darn cute, I just wanted to reach out and pet that little mako sea kitten!
Trust me, fellow sea-kitten chasers, this is going to spread and change our sport forever (no less than, for example, PETA’s campaign has changed all ice cream from cows’ milk to breast milk). For example, just one fisheries management official, Spud Woodward, who is Georgia’s chief of marine fisheries, says he’s figuring on proposing an Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Coast Sea Kittens. “I want the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to be the nation's leader in protecting our valuable sea-kitten resources.” Woodward acknowledges that may mean the ASMFC dropping other plans, but Woodward says the importance of managing sea kittens renders separate management plans for species like striped bass or red drum “insignificant.” And who could argue with that logic?
So there you have it, my fellow sea-kitty lovers. Hug one today. And by the way, don’t look for Sport Fishing magazine on the newsstands starting next issue. We’re now, proudly, Sea Kitten magazine. Thanks, PETA!

Jigging feature in Sport Fishing Magazine

More than one year ago, Doug Olander, the editor in chief of Sport Fishing Magazine (http://www.sportfishingmag.com/), contacted me in order to put together a sort of jigging symposium in Panama. He wanted an American, a European and a Japanese jigging expert to fish together the waters of the Gulf of Chiriquí and compare techniques of three different schools, with three different anglers, all supposedly "experts" in this field.

I thought the idea was brilliant and knowing Doug's skill on the PC keyboard would have come out great. I contacted Hideyuki Kitamura, probably one of the most experienced jigger in Japan and sure enough one of the most respected. My friend Setsuo Hamanaka (http://www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/Ham/) helped with the logistic and communication and Dough brought in Ben Secrets, an excellent fisherman from California who, while working for Shimano, not only helped them putting out the "Butterfly Jigging" campaign, one of the smartest marketing campaign done recently in the fishing history, but also learned a lot from the Japs Shimano-pros. By the way, Ben is now at Accurate (www.accuratefishing.com), and the American brand came out with some amazing conventional and spinning reels for jigging, machines that I am lucky enough to use.

Hideyuki gave us all a major class of how to fish in a sea that those days was not too generous. He hammered the critters while I could barely follow his lead. I have learnt a lot from him, and you can learn too by reading his comments.

The article is great, Doug nailed it, picking the best from the best. The most important tips and information are there, available for those who know how to "read" them and put them in practice. The issue is September/October, you shouldn't miss it.

GT from shore...kid me not!

I have been fishing the tropics for about 20 years now and one of the finest memory I have is the day I landed my first GT from shore. This happened some 3 years ago, faaaaar away from home, in Australia. Thanks to the courtesy of Damon Olsen, the owner of Nomad Sport Fishing (http://www.nomadsportfishing.com.au/), I had the chance to join my friend Bertrand "Frencho" Picarda and a group of "crazy" Japanese to a trip to Kenn reef, in the Coral Sea 300 miles away from the nearest Ozzie beach.

After British Airways had lost both my luggage and rod case, here I am, with my plastic bag full of stuff I had to buy to survive my week offshore, a borrowed popping rod from Bertrand and a borrowed jigging rod from Neil, at Neil's tackle in Brisbane. I had my reels, that was pretty cool, they where in my backpack, and I had my Nikon, in my hand luggage as well.

Late in the afternoon we boarded the Odyssey, the 75ft aluminum mother vessel together with the Japanese friend and off we went for a 36 hours cruise to the lost reef.

During the week of fishing I have seen two of the biggest GT I ever saw, landed by Bertrand and Hippo, one of the Japs. The reef where alive and teeming with life, the GTs huge and the surrounding waters full of Tunas, Wahoo and Sharks. Whenever you saw a feeding frenzy with birds diving all over the place, you would run with the skiff there and have plenty of sashimi in a blink of an eye. Imagine a large reef, so far away from shore where commercial fishing is not only prohibited, but also enforced. During our stay we had few times the airplanes of the Ozzie Navy patrolling the area to see who we where and what where we doing. Magic!

Well, to make a long story short, in the 4 days we spent at Kenn reef I had the time to make friends with Mogi-san, one of the gurus of Japanese jigging, Kenji Konishi, the creator of the Carpenter brand of rods and lures, and learn a trick or two about GT fishing. But it has been the very last day, just before departure, that I saw the light. The skiff dropped us on a strip of sand surrounded by reefs, once shallow but now at high tide plenty of water for the predators to swim in it. We started casting hoping to see a sign of life and I had a Green Jobfish following the stick bait on the second or third cast. A beautifully painted Coral trout followed and after a short struggle I managed to land it. It was then time for a GT to attack my Big Foot stick bait, not a big guy but who damn cares, it was my first GT ever landed from shore and was worth its weight in gold. One of the Japs soon followed and then Kenji landed his as well, you can see in the vertical image. Is hard to try to explain how exciting is to catch one of the strongest and largest predator (thus none of ours were spectacular, fish up to 30kg have been landed from shore) with your feet solidly attached to mother earth. No vessel pulling, no skipper motoring, no drift dragging. Just you, yourself and the critter. Each and everyone doing his best to survive.

I fish too much from boats nowadays but is well sculptured in my mind the memory of each and every fish I have caught from shore. This is where you can see the difference between a man and a kid, I kid you not!

Thanks again Damon and every one in the trip. I had to borrow stuff from many of you and will always be grateful. Hope to see you again soon.