We ran up to the Washington Canyon to get in on that white marlin bite that is going great guns. We got into the bite alright. They would come in and be pulling on both teasers, whacking the dredge, and in general destroying the spread. No real signs of fish. I did see one cutter and one free jumper but for the most part a whole bunch of nothing and then a pack would show up and tear things up. In spite of our best efforts to make sure that no marlin made it to the boat, we managed to catch 5. We broke them off, pulled them off, jumped them off, and just plain missed them. Some of the better boats had over 20 and there have been a couple of 30 plus catches already this month. It should be an amazing week for the White Marlin Open.
We had one drop-back mishap on a flat line that resulted in a “kapow!” as the line snapped. Everyone was looking at that reel while the other flat line was going off and I yelled down asking if anyone wanted to get that fish? Well, Deven Simmerman got on it with the fish jumping way back there. We cleared everything and went after it and got his line back. Got the leader and called it a catch but…as we got the rest of the leader up, there was just a bare hook, tangled in the line that had broken. So here we go, “Old Man and the Sea” style, Wes Blow and Stan Simmerman start hand-lining the marlin. They do pretty well for a while, gaining line but letting the fish run at times. They were winning the battle until someone got the idea of splicing the line back to the reel so they could fight the fish with the rod. Good idea, not so good execution. The hook popped out during the knot tying process. Deven never did catch a marlin though he had his shots. Everyone else on board caught one. I lost three fish before finally catching one; it was one of those days.
We had pop-up satellite tags for roundscale spearfish but I have determined that the best way to make sure that you will not see a roundscale is to have a tag ready to stick in it. We do not normally bring billfish in the boat but on this trip we had our own marlin vampire onboard. Lela Schlenker is one of Dr. John Graves’ graduate students. One of the things she is working on is billfish blood chemistry. She is her own walking science lab with a 12-volt powered centrifuge, syringes, canisters of liquid nitrogen and whatever else any self-respecting mad scientist should have. Her procedure is to bill the fish and bring it on board, collect blood and tissue samples, and release the fish. Some of the fish are fitted with pop-up tags. I’m not sure how she is going to deal with the larger billfish.
Wes Blow’s white marlin was his 50th citation fish qualifying him for Master Angler II and it is his 6th different citation for the year earning him another Expert Angler Award.
If you are interested in helping out with some of this research, contact Dr. John Graves at: [email protected] . He has Lela working on billfish blood chemistry, Emily doing a comparative study of roundscale spearfish and white marlin, and Ben working with bluefin tuna. They have all fished with me and all are super nice, helpful, don’t get in the way, and I have not managed to make any of them seasick yet (I have made some of his students miserable in the past but not this bunch). They are always looking for boats to ride along on and even if you do not have room for a student passenger you can still help by doing things like keeping a log of your billfish catches (white marlin vs roundscale), collecting finlets for DNA analysis and other things to help the scientists out.
