Squid Hunting!

by Donal Mountain on December 7th, 2008

From Chad’s email:

So, it turns out there’s basically a plague of giant Humboldt Squid centered down near Half Moon Bay. Hasn’t happened for decades. They reproduce fast and are rapacious eaters, meaning that it’s about the most guilt-free thing you could fish for. They get up to 6 feet long and 60 pounds, they’re extremely aggressive (cannibalistic, even), fight like hell, and they produce the largest calamari rings you will ever eat. Evar.

So it was that at sunrise the Huli Cat and her crew took us 25 miles out, to water 800 ft deep:

The squid weren’t all that hard to find out there; within ten minutes of dropping in our lures, we had caught maybe a dozen. They appeared alien, with big tentacles with claws and suckers, skin pulsating with color, a system of jet propulsion, and black ink that they squirt when under attack.

Here’s a video of my first catch. See how its color changes:

Their usual home is off the coast of Mexico, where the locals call them Diablo Rojo — the Red Devil.

Here’s a video of one of Chad’s catches. As he brings it to the surface, Gary skewers it with the gaff, a long pole with a hook on the end. Then it falls off Chad’s line and also off the gaff. It would have escaped back into to the deep, were it not for Gary’s quick thinking — he quickly skewered it again and hauled it aboard:

A video of my second catch. Chad first felt the tug at around 700 feet. But as he brought it up to the surface, it became harder and harder to reel in. We took turns. When it emerged from the water, a huge bite had been taken out of it! We thought it might have been a shark, but the truth was even more gruesome: another squid had started eating it.