It is September and the marlin bite is hot off of Virginia. That is not very surprising giving how the bite has been the past several years. This is a grand time to be fishing our offshore waters and I am very fortunate to live here. Get out there soon if you can. We never know how long the bite will last. It has been hot all through September the past couple of years and it is shaping up to be stellar again this year. We have already had a very good August bite as can be shown by this year’s Virginia Beach Billfish Tournament results. Sixty-nine boats fishing two days each caught 483 billfish: www.vbbt.com .
Yesterday, we took the Healthy Grin to the Norfolk Canyon. We had a lot of action all day long. I even got to crank on a couple of marlin. The hook pulled on my first fish after the fish decided to fight down and dirty. I had better luck with my second marlin and then I went back up top, where I belong, and stayed there. We jumped fish off, pulled fish off, and plain missed a bunch. It did not matter, more just kept coming in. I was playing tug-of-war with fish on teasers on each side while trying to drop back to fish on the long-riggers. We ended up catching 9 white marlin. We had a blue marlin come in and look at the short-rigger baits but did not eat.
I was backing down on a white marlin when we had quite a surprise. A very large whale surfaced right behind the boat, between us and our fish. Well, I stopped the boat and we just watched the whale. I knew we were going to break the fish off but our angler just held his rod up high and we were able to go get his marlin after the whale cleared.
In addition to the marlin, we caught 4 dolphin. We also had some mako shark encounters. There seem to be a lot of makos off of Virginia right now. Nobody was fishing for them but just about every boat out there had had at least one mako visit. Most ended in things like cut off teasers and destroyed dredges. Some were landed with a fortuitous hook placement. We had 3 mako bites. The first came out of the water and down on our short-rigger bait. We actually had that one about half-way to the boat before that fight was over. The other two bites were just clean cut-offs.
It is a really good time to be fishing Virginia right now.
