Andaman Islands – Topwater Action Paradise 2023
Another fantastic tropical trip is in the books and I have just made my way home with a group from the Andaman Islands where we spent a week swinging poppers and fighting a lot of fish. We met up in Helsinki on the way down and we were a nice mixed group of people from Sweden, Norway, Holland and Belgium. We spent the week on a beautiful spa resort hotel where we enjoyed our evenings after the fishing in the pool and eating wonderful food. Captain Bunty came to the hotel the first night to make sure we rigged up our gear accordingly and went through the plan for the week, since we came down on a week with some crazy tide push the jigging would be suffering but conditions for the surface fishing (witch all of the guests were there the most for) would be a lot better.
To go through all the crazy moments of the week would be a very long story so the pictures will do most of the talking, but then of course a movie from the week will follow later on where you will see a lot of action! There was some key moments of the week where dreams came true and the hype was real!
Day one really set the tone for the week when Bunty took us out to a semi deep reef where he was confident we would have some action, and boy was he right. After the first drift the reef just exploded and we had some crazy action where the GTs just went flying over our poppers with some bad attitude, double and tripple hook ups and missed fish left to right. Joakim who made his first ever Tropical trip manage to land his first ever two GTs and after landing 20 GTs the first day we were now warmed up for the week!
That the fish down there is crazy strong aint no understatement and people have asked me many times like ”don’t you get pulled over board?” Hahaha well I’ve of course always said thet it won’t happen, this time on the other hand I ended up having a crazy story to tell after day two… So in the middle of some crazy action up on a shallow area we had really good action and we started seeing some bigger fish attack our lures, since the waves were choppy out there I thought it would be a great idé to throw a sinking stickbait and well ”surprise strikes” is a fact when fishing down under the surface. And so I got a crazy strike that caught me off guard and the fish pulled me to the side of the boat and made me throw myself down to not go over the side! I gained control and fought the fish that were going crazy, when I got the fish closer to the boat he to a U turn and I had to run to the back of the boat, but this is when things went south… we passing the corner of the cabin the fish made a run out from the bout and caught me of balancer just as the boat rocked the other way and made me stop up on the side, well lets just say the boat disepered under my feet and I jumped into the sea. I manage to maintain my composure and flipped the bail arm to the reel, swam to the boat and manage to climb up and keep fighting and landing the fish as of being a beautiful GT on 25 kilos!
The GT action were consistent over the week and we lost some crazy big ones that missed, broke our leaders and yeah just messing with us, a couple of them being the biggest ones I’ve ever seen! Coming into the last day we were putting in a big effort fishing a lot deeper spots to rise som big ones and hopefully end the week with a banger. While we were slinging the biggest poppers we had, some of us took the chance to drop som jiggs as well since Captain Bunty spotted a lot of fish mid water that he really thought we were able to rise to the surface. Yes we did and all of a sudden we were in the middle of a Dogtooth Tuna feeding frenzy! Holy Moses they were going crazy, smashing our poppers boat side, flying up through the water missing our bait in full speed and smashing our jiggs just meters under the boat so we could see every bite, the amount of adrenaline is just un comparable to anything els. We manage to land 7 of them all between 12-20 kilos and the number of strikes and misses was crazy.
