There are a TON of kingfish in the surf... near high tide yesterday there was a fairly strong rip current from the 15knot steady NE wind coming down beach.
As the tide went out, and after a few keeper kingfish, I settled down, threw a kingfish head out and finally had some sniffs from toothy customers.
I really had a king head out looking for a drum, weak, blue, basically anything but a shark.
That is, it was on a straight mono leader. I was sitting there basking in the sun, dogs on my lap (yeah, both of them)... when zing over the rod went.
After fighting to get it out of the holder I knew this was no bluefish. For a moment I thought "Ray" but I felt the tail hitting the line and my thoughts went to whether the small 3/0 hook had found a nice corner of the mouth.
After a 5 minute battle that attracted a few drive-by viewers, boink... the mono parted.
ok, so get a wire leader, rig a hook, throw the next head out. Two minutes later the rod doubles and after a shorter fight ... BOINK! one of the clips went.
Dang, now I was ticked (at the sharks and myself). Rigged up a longer and stronger wire leader (ie, made sure there were no weak links in the terminal hardware. Of course, by now, whoever had taken the previous two heads moved on.
A half hour later we were about ready to wrap up. In fact, I was packing up and washing everything off when over the rod went.
What a beautiful finish to summer fishing!
