Sailfish

We ran south yesterday to get in on the sailfish action of the previous several days. Within 10 minutes of getting lines in, we were hooked up to our first sailfish. It was going to be a great day. A sailfish has been on Charles Southall’s bucket list for a long time. We got that taken care of and shortly had another sail attacking a big bait. It would not switch off to a smaller bait and we did not get that one. That was pretty much it for the day. We caught dolphin and got covered up by false albacore several times.

There was a good marlin bite about 20 miles north of us but I stuck with the sails. We can “always” catch a marlin. Boats were calling in their catches of the last day of the Virginia Beach Billfish Tournament. One boat had 3 blue marlin, 5 white marlin, and a spearfish. There were a number of slams being caught with roundscale spearfish being the final leg. There are a good number of roundscales around. Dr. John Graves was at the Mid-Atlantic Billfish Tournament going on at the same time as the VBBT. He said that most of the white marlin weighed in were actually roundscales.

Where we were, the top boat caught 5 sailfish, well short of the double-digit catches of the previous two days. The sailfish were there. We saw then jumping and cutting up the water most of the day but we only got the two bites. We stopped at the B Tower on the way in and caught some jacks.