Antarctic Toothfish Fishing | Ross Sea, Antarctica

Saturday, 6 January 2024
Day 45 of 110ish

Again, today started out like any other day…feeding people, cleaning, exercise, fish and not catch, feed people, clean, sauna, sleep, repeat.

Until around noon when the line started heaving with large toothfish. It was my time…my time to hold a toothfish!

CCTV And Me

In the mess lounge, there is a very big screen TV with the boats CCTV on it. You can pick and choose which camera to watch but about 99.9% of the time, the TV is on the moon pool. The money pit!

And I had my feet up and was watching what Tom and I call ‘Deadliest Catch”. There wasn’t much happening though that’s still somehow entertaining. We all get glued to it. Reality TV at it’s best. Don’t ask! I don’t even know or understand.

But then all the sudden, there were fish. And not just any old toothfish, big ones!

It was taking Tom a little bit of convincing to want to go down below where it is cold and stinky to hold a slimy fish. Fair enough! Until a big fat fish came on board.

All the sudden we were donning our winter jackets and down we went.

Getting Our Guns Out

As it was crew change, the crew coming off was wondering why we were so excited. We told them some big fish were coming up and they didn’t believe us!

Junior decided to have a look as well and his eyes popped. He couldn’t believe our fishing luck had changed so fast.

And another buzz spread through the crew as Tom and I tried to pick up these deep sea leviathan’s.

Remarkably unsuccessful, I had to pick up the smallest of the lot which was around 20kg. Tom made an attempt at a medium-large sized one and Junior had to pick it up for him. Hilarious!

Then the behemoth showed up! Suddenly it was a testosterone fueled bid to see who could lift the fish. It was massive. We think around 55kg.