The Virginia billfish bite just keeps going. It is rather impressive watching the Waterman, Backlash, Delta Dawn, Capt. Cheryl, Git-R-Done, Virginian, and the other great charter boats out there going in reverse. It also can be a bit irritating at times watching all of these boats with marlin jumping behind their boats after you (meaning me) have just missed your 5th (OK, maybe it was more than that) bite in a row. There are a lot of white marlin being caught along with good numbers of sails and blue marlin plus the occasional spearfish and the overnight sword bite. All kinds of slams are being caught. We have no idea how long this is going to last but we have a good chance for it to last the rest of this month. Get out there now if you can.
The Healthy Grin crew was doing one of our research things with Dr. John Graves and one of his graduate students, Lela Schlenker. We pulled small spoons to catch young-of-year bluefin tuna (mostly catching blackfin). The bluefin tuna are being used for DNA research and analysis of various chemical deposits in various body tissues that can be used to track where the fish has been living. The young-of-the year are sought because they have not had a chance to do much moving around yet so their tissues can be used to establish baselines for Western and Eastern Atlantic stocks. We did manage to catch 4 white marlin. Lela collected blood and tissue samples prior to releasing them with pop-up satellite tags.
Another note about the area charter boats: As we would see another Virginia Beach charter boat backing down (when we were not), I’d tell her that you need to go with him. These captains are really stepping up and helping with this fisheries research. They have gone out of their way to help Lela, Emily and John’s other researchers collect their samples and get their hi-tech tags out. If you charter one of these great captains, do not be surprised if there is a young person riding along to learn more about your fish.
