Whale of a Shark

We ran out to the Norfolk Canyon yesterday to give live-baiting marlin another try. Last week, we caught a blue marlin and some big sharks while watching the Rebel catch a dozen or so white marlin. We managed to not catch any of the of the white marlin that visited our boat. Yesterday, was much the same. We watched Rebel catch a bunch. Ric Burnley was on that boat and got a shot of us not catching white marlin. Ric has an article in the current Salt Water Sportsman on this fishery. I think he needs to write another one to tell us how to really do it. We did have some action. We caught another big hammerhead and we had a much larger shark in the spread. A huge whale shark came in and really liked our dredges, nosing right up to them. Worried that it was going to get tangled up in our fishing gear, I turned the boat away and it just followed us like a puppy dog…a very large puppy. Eventually, it had enough of playing with our teasers and swam away. We jumped off a white marlin and missed a couple. We had one bait destroyed by a wahoo and we got a double hook-up of bigeye tuna. That was an impressive bite with a lot of white water. We had them on TLD 30s on little white marlin circle hooks. We broke one off but after a fight of a couple of hours, we slid the second one through the tuna door. Back at the dock, Capt. Randy Butler of the Rebel came over to congratulate us on our bigeye. I told him that I was getting tired of watching marlin jumping behind his boat. He’s a super nice guy. He said it is not as easy as everyone thinks. He gave us some pointers and said to stick with it and we would get the live-baiting thing down. The Rebel certainly has it down.