took another trip to the beach here in Japan this weekend with hopes of landing a shark. Its been terribly slow lately. I'm on a local facebook spearfishing page and there's been reports of a few tiger sharks and some crazy big bull sharks so I was kinda expecting something to happen. I would be ecstatic to finally land a Ryukan Tiger! It just wasn't to be. not a single run. I arrived around 11pm Friday night in the middle of a storm. luckily though, just after I arrived there was a nice break and I was able to set up camp in just the slightest drizzle. I got the tent up and baits rigged on my senator 12/0 and everol 14/0. I left my Makaira 80W bait less but did rig it up to deploy at any minute. my plan was to drop a sizable chunk or moray eel on the 12/0 fairly close at around 60 paddles in the kayak and drop a tuna at 110 paddles on the 14/0. that's about 120 and 200ish yards. I made sure to get the eel chunk up close to some rocky reef area that has produced in the past and I know there's even a few white tip reef sharks hanging out (I just want to check one off the list). the 14/0 with tuna however, I am unfamiliar with the bottom but its the same spot of our last hook up which was a fish in the 10ft range and was dumping 32-35 lbs of drag like nothing before it threw the hook when it jumped and summersaulted...so why the hell not? I took another look at the tides and decided to leave the 80W dry and I'd run out a bait on it at high tide at around 8am to have the max amount of baits for this huge swing that was happening. the tide was set to peak at 6.9ft and bottom out at 0.02ft. lots of water movement and the rain was pushing cool, murky water into the zone which seems to have helped out in the past. My buddy Jake arrived a few hours after I did and I let him decide where he wanted to drop his baits.
well. ill sum it up real quick and we didn't catch a damn thing.
I did get to try out my new tent though. its a Eureka Assault 4 outfitter. retail on this thing is around $500 but I found it on ebay (from campsaver.com) for $380. now you might be thinking, Holy moly that's a lot for a tent! I can agree and I never thought id consider spending over $200 for a tent but after having a couple bad experiences in tents and always being cramped I'd spend $1,000.00 on a tent if it stood up to the elements time after time. It's easy to judge from a warm living room and convince yourself you don't need to spend that much on a tent for a couple nights of camping, but once your out there, and your the meat part of a tent quesadilla you'll be wishing you dropped 2 grand on the best outfitter tent there is.
So on to the tent. its 7'6" x 8'6" and I think 4'6" tall in the center. its based off the design of our USMC 2 man combat tents that we sometimes get for the field. I've had these tents in typhoon like conditions and they held up fine. that was one of the deciding factors in getting it. the two man is 7ft x 50" and around 40" tall. its nice for one person and sleeps two comfortably as long as you don't have any gear inside. the assault 4 (4 man and 4 season, depending on what site you look at) is a mansion for one and sleeps two with all the gear you could pack in just fine. we could spread gear out between the two vestibules and inside and sleep 3 very comfortably but I think 4 would be cramped unless it was car camping and all we had were ourselves inside and shoes under the vestibules.
The tent went up rather quick. I had already practiced on this tent twice and have set up the 2 man tents countless times. I immediately ditched the stock stakes and got some of the standard military 9" stakes. I even bought them and didn't swipe them from work.
they have a hole drilled in the top and I attached 50lb D rings to each of them so the stake down loops of the tents wouldn't be worn by the stake and buried in the sand/dirt the whole time. (trying to think ahead ya now?). a lot of the reviews I read said it was impossible to assemble with one person. well, I call bullsh!t because I did it by myself 3 times and while on the beach it took me about 10 minutes to get it up with rain fly on and another 5 to properly stake it down and position a ground tarp.
I didn't get to test it in wind but i'm very confident in its ability to stand up to the 40-50kph winds we get frequently due to its design off the USMC combat tent. I did get to test it in rain though and it performed flawlessly. no leaks at any seams even though the instructions recommend sealing them by the consumer. the vestibules worked just as they should and kept everything dry. ventilation was good and I didn't have any condensation build up, even with two people in it. I did have a small tent fan hanging from the ceiling the whole time. it kept it from getting stagnant in there and I highly recommend one but I do not believe it played a huge roll in the tents overall performance.
here's from the back of camp, looking out to sea after a small break in the storm on Saturday morning.
looking south at camp. a couple coolers full of bait and the yeti with 4 days of food and drinks.
north. same crap plus my small BBQ. it was a short walk so I got to bring the BBQ instead of a small stove.
the creek that runs from the mountains behind us to the ocean.
I hope I can share some more shark pics with you guys soon, but for now it looks like I'm just doing some camping.
