Jigging and popping in the Maledives

[:en]

Thomas Søbirk

We had booked the trip to Maldives one year before, so expectations were high! Four Danish guys with the hopes of catching plenty of GT’s, also a couple of big ones and then a lot of light tackle fun on our PE 4-5 gear. We also brought our jigging gear despite reports suggesting that Maldives is more of a popping than a jigging destination.

Together with Jacob Rønnow, Nikolaj Bielecki and my father I escaped the cold Danish weather and travelled through Dubai and on to Male on the 14th of November. Upon arrival we were greeted by Mohamed, the captain of Magic Life. After another three hours in the speedboat we reached Lhaviyani. The accommodation was simple but clean and the island was…let’s just say “very local Actually, we didn’t see any other tourists before we were back at the airport!

Our trip was right in the short local monsoon-period (which we didn’t know when we booked the tickets;-)) so we had 3½ days with sunshine and 3½ days with heavy rain, so we had the chance to see Maldives at its best, and at its worst. None of us had experienced rain this before, literally sea and sky were one and the visibility turning into almost zero. Amazing.

Overall we caught 57 GTs, with two big ones amongst them – 118 cm (weighed at between 29-31 kg) on a Salter Samson Scale Weight) and another even bigger one at 125 cm. Both of them hit a Heru Skipjack.

Almost all of the GTs were in the class of 60-90 cm, so there is no need to bring in the ultra heavy gear. PE 5-6 is suitable, but never the less we got reefed a couple of times – typically on lighter PE3-4 gear, when a +100 cm fish took the lure and went straight for the reef.

To give an example, I caught 22 GTs on the trip (6½ days of fishing), with the biggest measuring 89 cm, and lost a couple of fish in the range of 100 cm, but didn’t have contact with something bigger than this. And it wasn’t because I was fishing smaller lures. 90% of the time, I was fishing Skipjack 90/120 g or Gamma 160H with PE5-6 gear.

However, we had some world class fishing, with a lot of different fish: Red Snapper, Green Jobfish, Sweet lip, Bluefin Trevally, Garfish and Groupers. We even had a big shark and a wahoo chasing our stickbaits – and lots of action, so we were extremely pleased with the trip! The jigging was pretty slow, but on the way back to Male we found some great action with three smaller dogtooth tunas (6-8 kg), some almacos/amberjacks in the same range and various species of groupers..
Further information:
Thomas Søbirk
thomas@getawaytours.dk
www.getawaytours.eu