The Beast of Brewer's Beacon - Help?

[ArmaDragkun]

Hello.

For the past few days I've been attempting to complete this quest and yet I'm having no luck at all.

Just want to make sure I'm doing everything correctly and if there is any advice out there you all can provide me or tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

Weather: Clear skies
Area: Cape Westwind
Time: 9am to 2pm
Bait: Lugworm

I then start to fish using the Release List to set free all the non HQ fish I catch. I fish and wait for the message to pop up about how a fish is rising to feed.

I then use Patience and then Precision Hookset for the first fish, then Powerful Hookset for the second fish and then pray I get the Titanic Sawtooth as the third fish.

So far I think I had a message pop up about my gathering not being high enough so I went and bought level 50 fishing gear to boost that up on top of that I use some food to increase my gathering rate as well.

Am I missing anything or is it just now a waiting game of the correct weather and getting lucky?

Additional Info

Gathering Rate: 299 (Not buffed with food)
Perception: 241 (Not buffed with food)

[Brightamethyst]

Welcome to big fishing! It'll only get worse from here

First off, there's no point in releasing fish. Just toss/sell/desynth the rest later. Second, you can ignore that message about fish rising to feed. IIRC that's the intuition buff for catching an unrelated fish in that same hole. For the Sawfish all you need to do is keep mooching at the right time/weather and pray to the gods of RNG (and get used to it, because that describes 99% of all big fishing.)

That said, those stats looks pretty low. They're probably technically high enough but this whole quest will be a lot easier if you level up a bit more and get some better gear first.

[ArmaDragkun]

Ah thanks a lot!

[ArmaDragkun]

Spent a bit more of my now dwindling supply of Gil and managed to get

Gathering: 381 (Buffed with food)
Perception: 297 (Buffed with food)

Also boosted up my GP a bit more so I can more often use the fishing skills hopefully it pays off!