Dr. John Graves has a new batch of grad students. One is working with bluefin tuna. There is probably going to be a study with black marlin that will cause some poor grad student to spend a season at Tropic Star. I’m applying to grad school. One student, Emily, will be working with white marlin and roundscale spearfish here in the mid-Atlantic. We do not know a lot about rounscales. During all of those tagging studies we did down in Venezuela, our roundscale catch was zero. In the mid-Atlantic, they seem to be mixed in with the white marlin and are not an uncommon catch. Emily will be looking at a couple of things, the ratio of rounscales to whites here. They already have a good source of data from the large white marlin tounaments as tissue samples have been collected for many years. Those show the large fish weighed in but what about the average fish being caught? She will also be placing long-term pop-up tags in both whites and roundscales to see what they they do over time. Some charter boats and other dedicated billfish boats are volunteering to keep catch logs of whites and roundscales when they can get a positive ID and some will allow Emily to ride along on trips to place her tags.
Emily had not caught a marlin or tagged one before so we headed out yesterday to try and get her some experience before she starts riding with the professionals.
We ended up going 2 for 4 on whites. We caught our fish just north of the Norfolk in 55 fathoms. Top boat there had 6 fish. They had a bite down south at the triple 0s, top boat I know of there had 8. The best bite was near the Washington and we worked our way up there late. Top boat there got 20. We had a couple of nice dolphin. Bernie Sparrer got our largest at 28.25 pounds. There were some tuna caught but we never had a tuna bite. All 4 of of our marlin bites were flat-line bites. From now through September, it is going to be great marlin fishing out there. People need to get out, take off work, whatever.
If you are willing to help with this study, you can contact Dr. Graves at: [email protected]
