White Marlin Saturday

We fished for white marlin at the Norfolk Canyon yesterday and had a good day. We caught chub mackerel, bridled them up, and slow trolled the area. It is a technique we first tried last summer. In our area, Captain Randy Butler on the Rebel is the master at doing this. We fished near each other and kept in touch over the radio most of the day. We ended up with a similar catch. Both boats had tilefish and a tuna in the box and both were flying release flags back at the dock. The only real difference was our shark catches. They only caught a dozen big hammerheads. We were on a shark catching roll. Mostly big hammerheads, having as many as 4 hooked up at the same time with others with them. We caught one non-hammerhead, I think a dusky, that already had a big circle hook in it. It probably was a long-line hook. We released it with another circle hook. Not ten minutes later, we were hooked up again. It was the same shark, now with three circle hooks, each on the left side of its jaw. I guess he is a left side chewer.

We ended up catching 5 white marlin, pulling the hooks on a couple of others short of the leader and had a few more that we did not get hooked up. We collected DNA samples for VIMS. The Rebel did a little bit better. They released 20 white marlin and jumped off 17 others. They ended up with 4 times the flags we did. There is more to this technique that we have figured out. Their tuna was also 4 times larger than the 50-pound yellowfin we caught. Their one tuna was a 200-pound bigeye. So, pretty similar catches. Just take the Healthy Grin catch, multiply by 4 and you have the Rebel catch (other than the sharks).