Chapter 290 - 190: China Also Has Emperor Star Garoupa
Chapter 290: Chapter 190: China Also Has Emperor Star Garoupa
"Wow, you’re even luckier than me!" At the mention of "mouse grouper," Yi Chen immediately leaned in for a closer look. Her smugness vanished, replaced by envy.
This mouse grouper wasn’t very large, about the same size as her red-spotted grouper. The price difference, however, was significant. Gu Nan’s fish was worth at least 150 more per jin than a red-spotted grouper, maybe even more.
"Heh heh, just a coincidence!" Gu Nan himself hadn’t expected to catch an even more incredible grouper just moments later.
Compared to the red-spotted grouper, the mouse grouper was far more scarce and rare. He’d finally landed a monster catch tonight.
Inspired by the two valuable catches, Yi Chen set both her rods to fish the mid-level water, hoping to land more expensive groupers.
But these fish weren’t called rare for nothing. Over the next hour or so, the bite rate was decent, but unfortunately, most of what they caught were black porgy and barred knifejaw. The occasional Sea Bass, Sea Wolf, and mackerel also joined the fray.
Fishing with two rods, Yi Chen caught twenty-three fish.
Gu Nan caught about half that, eleven fish.
But his most valuable catch was just a barred knifejaw, which made him decide to switch depths and try for deep-sea fish.
Gu Nan switched to a heavier sinker to get his baited hook to the bottom faster.
He had just let his baited hook sink to the bottom. As he flipped the bail arm and turned the handle to retrieve a few meters of line, his rod suddenly dipped. A fish was on!
’Damn, is the bite this good?’
Puzzled, Gu Nan gripped the rod and lifted. Hey, this one was heavy.
The rod was bent sharply; the fish definitely wasn’t small. He tried to turn the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
However, even with the drag locked, the line wasn’t spooling out too quickly. The blue rod’s drag was only fifty jin, so clearly, the fish couldn’t be *that* massive.
Yi Chen had seen him change sinkers just now, so she knew he was bottom fishing. Seeing him hook such a big fish on his first drop made her feel conflicted.
The bite was good where she was, and she was consistently catching fish. But the big ones were at the bottom, which put her in a real dilemma.
While she was hesitating, she caught two more fish. By then, Gu Nan had finally pulled his catch to the surface.
The fish was reddish-brown overall, covered in spots. It looked like a leopard coral grouper, but with some differences.
It was such a distinctive fish that not only Gu Nan, but Yi Chen as well, recognized it instantly.
Of course she was familiar with it; her shop sold imported Emperor Star Garoupa.
The color of an Emperor Star Garoupa changes significantly from juvenile to adult, and can also vary depending on its environment.
In Gu Nan’s game, the Seven-Star Rock elite guide listed the Emperor Star Garoupa as a five-star marine product with a suggested price of 350 per jin.
When he first saw the fish, his heart skipped a beat. ’Did I forget to turn off the rod’s special function?’
But he realized a moment later that he was using the Bering Sea blue rod, not the Seven-Star Rock golden rod. ’What’s there to worry about?’
The Emperor Star Garoupa is the second-largest fish in the *Plectropomus* genus, with adults reaching up to 1.2 meters in length.
Gu Nan’s catch was huge, nearly a meter long by visual estimation and weighing around forty jin. No wonder it was such a struggle to reel in.
Although the fish was pulled up from the deep sea, the fight hadn’t been fast, so its internal organs hadn’t been forced out of its mouth. It was still struggling powerfully at the surface and might just survive until they got back to shore.
Gu Nan couldn’t bring himself to use a gaff on it, so he had Yi Chen hold the rod while he went to get the sling from the crane to hoist the fish aboard.
For a monster of forty jin, a landing net wasn’t reliable enough. The crane was the safest bet.
"Ah Nan, I didn’t know we had Emperor Star Garoupa in our own waters!" Yi Chen remarked as she watched the fish being hoisted up.
"Yeah, of course we do. But you know how it is with our local resources—they’re not as abundant as abroad. The good thing is, when we catch them ourselves, we don’t have to pay import tax. That’s one of the reasons I insisted on buying a boat to go fishing. It’s a hobby that makes money. How great is that!"
"That’s true. This one’s probably worth around fourteen thousand. With taxes, you’d lose one or two thousand of that."
Yi Chen was used to dealing with money; she estimated the fish’s weight and instantly calculated its total value.
Hearing that, Gu Nan felt pretty good. At least this covered the cost of the boat rental and fuel.
The fish’s belly was swollen, full of air.
Gu Nan took out a hollow needle designed for venting fish. He located a spot on its body, just behind the pectoral fin, and inserted the needle through the scales at a 45-degree angle.
He didn’t insert it deep, just enough to pierce the outer skin without damaging any internal organs.
If you accidentally punctured the internal organs, you could forget about the fish making it back to shore alive. You’d be better off just putting it on ice immediately.
A hissing sound escaped as the fish’s belly visibly deflated, and the fish immediately became much more lively.
"Ah Nan, what are you doing?" Like a curious child, Yi Chen stopped fishing and squatted down beside him to watch.
"When you pull deep-sea fish up, their bellies fill with air because of the pressure change. If we want them to survive until we get back to shore, we need to release that air."
"This is called a hollow needle. To vent the air, you pierce it right here, but you have to do it at an angle and not too deep, to avoid hitting the organs. You just need to puncture the belly skin to let the air out."
Considering Yi Chen would likely be joining him on future trips, he decided to teach her the venting method.
"I see!"
’Learned something new again.’ Yi Chen stood up, satisfied, and returned to her fishing spot.
Seeing Gu Nan catch such a huge Emperor Star Garoupa, it was impossible for her not to be a little jealous.
Her earlier indecision vanished. She worked her rod, let out more line, and prepared to fish the deep as well.
What the two of them didn’t know was that the bait in the nearby crab and shrimp pots had attracted a large number of sea creatures, causing the fish to become densely concentrated right under their boat.
The moment Yi Chen’s hooks hit the bottom, not even thirty seconds passed before she had a fish on both rods almost simultaneously.
Her eyes lit up. She hadn’t expected the bite to be even better on the bottom.
The efficiency of her two electric reels was no match for Gu Nan’s manual setup. One after another, she pulled up deep-sea fish, most of them weighing three to five jin, with some of the larger ones tipping the scales at over ten.
She was grinning from ear to ear. Although none of her catches were exceptionally valuable, she was definitely winning in terms of quantity.
Another hour passed. She had caught well over a hundred jin of fish with her two rods, sixty or seventy jin more than Gu Nan.
There was no helping it. In shallow water, they could compete, but in the deep, how could a manual reel compare to an automatic one? The efficiency just wasn’t there.
’If I can’t compete on quantity, then how about I go for quality?’
Oil rigs were known for producing big catches. Relatively few fishing boats came this far out to sea, so the fish population wasn’t as easily depleted.
After catching a black-toothed hairtail, Gu Nan switched out his hook and tied on a thirty-centimeter-long jig. He was going to try some bottom-jigging.
His main income came from the fish produced by his game map anyway. Catching a few less fish now didn’t matter in the slightest; he might as well go all-in for a monster.
If he caught one, it would be a massive win. If he didn’t, it was no loss.
Yi Chen saw him switch to the jig and knew he was going after a big one.
After a moment’s thought, she decided not to follow his lead.
’With the bite this hot, wasting even ten minutes is a loss. I’ll just stick to what’s working.’
He went back into the cabin to put on a fighting belt, then came out and dropped the jig into the water. Propelled by the weight of the sinker and the lure itself, the line spooled out rapidly.
Once the line went slack, Gu Nan lifted the rod from its holder, flipped the bail arm, and completely locked down the drag.
Even though he was holding the rod himself, he could easily handle a fifty-jin drag, so locking it down was no problem.
A thirty-centimeter jig was too large for any fish without a big enough mouth to swallow.
Drawn in by the bait from the crab pots, a school of fish was circling the jig.
They tried to nip at the lure, but it was too big for them to swallow.
Some of the more aggressive fish even tried to bite it with their sharp teeth, only for the lure to be fine while their teeth nearly shattered, leaving their heads ringing.
Gu Nan gripped the rod and began to jerk it up and down, bringing the lure to life.
The previously motionless lure suddenly shot up and down, startling the surrounding fish and sending them scattering in all directions.
They didn’t flee far, however; the sudden movement had just given them a scare.
Once they sensed there was no threat, they gathered around again.
However, just as they were curiously inspecting what kind of "fish" this was, a school of fish several dozen meters to the east suddenly fled in a panic, as if they had encountered something terrifying.
The next moment, a large, stout fish swam over leisurely, and all other fish scattered from its path.
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP...
The big fish had been swimming around aimlessly, looking for slow-moving octopuses.
But the sudden sound caught its attention. After pinpointing the direction, it began to swim slowly toward the lure.
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP...
As it drew nearer, the sound became clearer.
Soon, it saw an arrogant little "fish" that seemed to be provoking it. Instead of fleeing with the others at its approach, this one was bobbing up and down defiantly.
The big fish was instantly enraged and charged forward.
It had expected the little fish to flee, but it didn’t move.
In that case, why hold back? It opened its cavernous maw and swallowed the "fish" in one gulp.
The result was a sudden, sharp pain in its mouth. It was the first time the big fish had ever been hooked, and it didn’t understand what was happening. It instinctively thrashed its head, struggling, even trying to bite into the sandy seabed to dislodge the thing in its mouth.
The fish was incredibly powerful. On the boat, the fishing rod instantly bent into a deep arc, like a fully drawn bow.
"Fuck, there really was a monster down there?" Gu Nan was shocked and amazed. A monster fish after only five or six minutes? He’d thought he’d be jigging for a long time.
But he reacted quickly, immediately trying to lift the rod to set the hook as it bent downward. He couldn’t budge it. The fish was much, much bigger than he had imagined.
Realizing the situation, he immediately hugged the rod, heaved upward, and braced himself against the ship’s rail for leverage.
The fish’s strength was immense; for a moment, Gu Nan couldn’t even begin to guess how big it was.
But with a bottom fish, the first thing you had to do was pull it up a little, to keep it from diving into a hole or digging in on the seabed.
So, bracing himself against the rail, Gu Nan strained to lift the rod while simultaneously cranking the handle with all his might, trying to gain back some line.
Yi Chen’s mouth hung slightly open. ’Did he really hook a giant?’