Heading out on the water off Nanoose with her dog Beck and fishing rod on Sunday, Margot Mallicoat was up for adventure.
“(With) fishing … I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Margot Mallicoat, a resident of Nanoose Bay.
The avid angler has long had a bucket list wish to catch a huge halibut off remote Winter Harbour on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
“I’ve never caught a halibut up there,” Mallicoat told CHEK News.
So on a June fishing trip in Winter Harbour, her third year trying, she cast her line trying to catch a halibut again.
“We went for six days to try to catch a halibut, and I couldn’t get it done. The weather was a challenge, we couldn’t get to the spaces we wanted to get to,” said Mallicoat.
“And I was a bit heartbroken. It was the last day, and I thought, well, I’m just going to put a line down by the dock,” she added.
“I was feeling a bit cursed, last shot and what the heck.”
When standing at the docks, about to leave, with her line in the water, Mallicoat felt a tug.
“‘I am not kidding. Look at this thing! Oh my god!'” Mallicoat says excitedly in a video capturing the moment she saw a halibut on her line.
“When I saw it, I was pretty excited like, ‘Wow, this actually happened.'”
Even more striking because halibut are usually caught offshore, in deep water, and nowhere near shallow docks.
Mallicoat’s catch was a metre-long, 44-pound halibut.
“So I was hollering down to my friends to come down because I couldn’t believe it had happened, and yeah, it was a pretty amazing moment,” she said.
“It’s always worth a shot, last try, first try, you never know when magic’s going to happen.”
Skye Ryan
