The billfish bite is good right now with signs that it could turn epic yet again this year. We got out Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday we went 0 for 8 or so. Broke one off right above the hook. Not much pressure on the fish but the leader broke for some reason. The rest we just plain messed up. Talked about changing the boat name to “We Suck”. Top boat at our marina was flying 10 flags.
Sunday, we did a bit better. Saw a lot of fish. Not crazy yet, but good. Birds and marlin working bait balls here and there. Free jumpers, tailers. Inshore mostly, 50 fathoms. Boats offshore are seeing fish too but so far, the top boats (10-11 fish a day) have been around 50 fathoms. The area from the 40900 up to the 41200 was a good area this weekend. We had the hook pull on 3 fish during the fight. We had 2 or more fish in the spread a couple of times. Missed right many fish, too much action to keep count. We caught 4. There will be some high catch counts in the VBBT this week (storm permitting). www.vbbt.com
The Ladies tournament was yesterday. I think Sniper won it. Lots of white marlin being called in, heard a couple of blues, and a first: “roundscale spearfish” release was called in.
The 4 we got were whites except maybe for 1. 13 year-old Deven Simmerman, got his first marlin. One of John Graves grad students, Ben Marcek, got his first offshore fish ever. We billed the other 3, we wanted to bill this one to get a better look at it. It was definitely the smallest fish but it fought the hardest. (note: Ben used a harness, someone commented that they did not remember John’s other grad student using a harness).
The thing was not lit up like the 4 roundscales we caught last year but it was acting and it looked a bit different. Ben had the leader up multiple times but we could not bill that fish. Hook eventually pulled. Did not put on any aerial display other than the initial hook-up. Roger stuck his camera under water and got some kind of picture of it. We will see what that shows. We had a pop-up tag for a roundscale. Guess we will just have go out and try again. Go away Irene!
