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I STUMBLED UPON a photo of Vic Van Wie and his kayak-fishing world-record 256- pound thresher shark while making some final online arrangements for my first kayak-fishing trip. Here’s a guy in a T-shirt, surf trunks and sandals kneeling beside a 12-foot kayak and an 11-foot fish. Below the photo he recounts the catch: “The thresher shark hit about 20 minutes after I started soaking a live mackerel. He ripped off all 80 yards of mono top-shot and was into the Spectra backing within a few seconds. Even with my bait buck- et in the water [used as a sea anchor] I was still getting pulled at a pretty good clip. After about an hour and a half it turned into a standoff with him about 20–30 feet below the kayak. For another half an hour we played tug of war.” When he finally landed the shark a kayak-fishing buddy named Rhino grabbed the leader and then “beat it upside the head” until it stopped thrashing.
I don’t even like putting a worm on my hook, let alone dragging a 256- pound shark across my kayak. I’d committed to this article on kayak
fishing and after reading about the mon- sters being caught off the coast of California I knew I couldn’t just spend a day filling a pail with panfry sunfish if it was going to be a good story. The biggest, meanest fish I’d be able to find in the freshwater waterways of Ontario—the one closest to Vic’s thresh- er shark—is the muskellunge, or muskie. If you’re a serious muskie hunter (you apparently hunt, not fish, for muskie) you just call them ‘skies, as in, “Hey, wanna go on a three-day whitewater kayak-fishing trip in November down a class III–IV river hunting for ‘skies?” It was the perfect combination of all things you never consider doing. So much so that every man I baited with the idea was immediately hooked, and every wife of those men thought we were nuts.
Good kayaking friends who’d never mentioned fishing before came out of their gear closets with Old Pal tackle boxes, dusty bamboo rods and reels spewing nests of 20-year-old line. And real fishermen, guys who’d usually motor not paddle, like my dad who doesn’t kayak and can’t swim, also
wanted to go on the trip.
It’s this mass appeal that has the kayak-fishing segment of the paddle- sports industry growing faster than a fisherman’s tale after a couple of Coors. And the kayak manufacturers are not letting this one get way. The ability to draw from the massive pool of fishers and paddlers is the reason fishing kayaks are the current leader of kayak industry sales. Leisure Trends, a market research group in Colorado, states that more than 81 million people in the U.S. fished at least once in the last three years. Toss in the 3.9 million who tried kayaking… and kayak fishing is poised to land some trophy fish and net huge sales revenues.
•••
THE ONLY PICTURES of kayak fishing I had ever seen were much like the picture of Vic Van Wie—a shining sun and a guy in surf shorts with flip-flopped feet dan- gling over the kayak in clear blue salt water. This wasn’t the fishing I knew. The fishermen looked more worried about heat stroke than hypothermia; they were wearing sun hats, not tuques
FOLLOW THE FISH... FINDER. 24 // Summer 2005
BIG LURE, BIG FISH.
MULTI-DAY WHITEWATER KAYAK FISH’N.
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