Last night I got back from a trip to Eiao, in the Marquises Group of islands.

The trip was with a number of other forum members, and there were two boats fishing each day, so it is impossible for me to write a single report on the whole lot – so I’ll include only pics of my fish and leave the others to add their photos and stories to the thread if they are keen.

Despite only fishing for 5 days, I was gone for 11 days due to the travel time required to get to this extremely remote location (a total of 9 flights and roughly 26 hours of sea voyage return).
We were living on a large sailing vessel which we used as a mother ship, making day trips out on the two tenders to fish Eiao and the surrounding islands. It was a jigging/popping trip, with my personal target being a large (30kg+) dogtooth tuna.

The scenery at Eiao is incredible. Severe rockfaces which appear out of the sea, and span 100m or more straight up. Of the 1100 photos that I have from this trip, not one did the place justice – it is truly something that needs to be seen.

The first day was to be a bit of a ‘warm up’ day, so we didn’t cover any large distances from the mothership. Having said that on Eiao, this really isn’t necessary, as some exceptional fish were landed near to the mothership – with some GTs even being taken on popper from the mothership itself.

On this day we tried jigging at some of the deeper grounds in the 80-100m range chasing the big dogtooth that we all badly wanted. Unfortunately, we may have underestimated our opponents. Everybody on my boat hooked up to suspected BIG doggies – but nobody got a fish more than 40m off the bottom. Despite our heaviest tackle and near to locked drags, everyone either got blown away into the structure, or had their assist cords bitten through. This wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought.

We also had a bit of a fish close to the cliffs, were I pulsed some red bass and blue spot trevally on popper, as well as some coronation trout and other assorted reefies on the jig.
Despite the good hook-ups I was a bit concerned by the end of the first day, as no decent fish were landed.

The second day was a bit hotter – with lots of bass on the topwater (but lacking on the GT front) and some really hot jigging action for bass, trout, jobfish and GTs. We found a spot holding lots of doggies out from an island known as ‘little eiao’ (15nm or so from Eiao), but a combination of getting smoked and sharked meant that once again, our boat didn’t land any doggies. The sharks were intense on this day, and I must have lost close to 10 jigs that day alone, getting me scared I’d run out before the trip was over. The other boat had a really great session at the end of this afternoon (including double hook-ups of small to medium doggies on stickbait), but I’ll leave it one of them to add this to the report.

The third day was both my birthday, as well as the best day of fishing I’ve had in my life. The action was flat out from the get-go, with the first fish landed being a big YFT on stickbait by Tom, which I’m sure he’ll add pics of. I jigged another good YFT later in the day, but lost it at the leader so no pics.  The GT jigging action was nuts. I got around 15 of them for the day to around the 115cm (est 30kg) mark, as well as my first three Dogtooth. All those doggies were taken on the same jig in a crazy 60 minute session with double and triple hook-ups of doggies and GTs happening.

On day 4, we went out to a very rarely visited sand cay which was around a 2hr steam from Eiao. This place looked insane, with a vast area of shallow reef which looked like it was going to go off. Both boats landed some GTs on the topwater here, but the place didn’t fire like we thought it would (and like we were told it often does), so we went back near to Eiao where we landed some more nice GTs on the jig.

On the fifth and final day, it was another slow start. I picked up some small reefies on the jig as well as missing a heap of red bass on the casting gear (couldn’t keep the hooks in them!) before we went out to try for the XOS doggie at the deep grounds again. Unfortunately, it was shark central. Heaps of great hook-ups at that spot, but everyone on board got sharked, with only some jobfish and small YFT being landed.

To finish up we went back for an afternoon session at the place we’d gotten the doggies on day 3. Unfortunately I’d had issues with an aftermarket handle on my heavy jig combo (rendering the reel unusable), so was down to using my lighter reel (spooled with PE5) on my heavy rod. This wasn’t an idea setup, and I got blown away on the first two doggies which I hooked, during which time Erin got a nice doggie and Tom had landed a nice GT. Determined to get one last good fish for the trip I re-rigged and dropped again, only to get a cracking great hit on the jig. Line was flying off the reel under full drag and I knew straight away that this was a really good fish. The runs were blisteringly fast and erratic in the dogtooth style, but the thing felt really weighty and I had some doubts as to what it might be.

Eventually this big beasty surfaced, which measured a touch over 150cm to the fork and was estimated by the guide to be around the 47kg mark. I’d gotten what I came for, and was stoked to say the least! The fact that the fish was taken in around 30-35m of water and extremely close to land made it even more satisfying.

There was a wide range of flash gear used on the trip, with a heap of new gear from Temple Reef being tested out, which performed really well. I’ll leave it for the Temple Reef guy(s) to comment further.
In addition to that, my combos used were
Carpenter MH80H, Stella 18,000, PE10
Carpenter CV79/40, Stella 10,000, PE8
Carpenter BC75MHS, Stella 10,000, PE5
Synit Razar 350 ‘White Tiger’, Saltiga 35LD, PE6
Smith AMJ52H, Ocea Jigger 4000P, PE5
Yamaga Blue Sniper 77/3, Stella 5000, PE3 (was a waste of time bringing this in hindsight)
 

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