Virginia Swordfish

We ran the Healthy Grin out to the Norfolk Canyon for an overnight trip:
3 swordfish, 3 white Marlin, 1 yellowfin, 1 skipjack, 1 wahoo, 2 hammerheads, about 15 dolphin divided between gaffers, slingers and bailers.
Started out with our normal jumping off, missing white marlin. Managed to catch a couple. It was not red hot but should have caught a half dozen. Got hit by gaffers twice out in the open holding on to 4 each time. Just about dark, put out a bigeye trolling spread and immediately hooked up…white marlin…pulled the hook. Then we got the tuna bite, got excited thinking bigeye but it was a yellowfin. Not big but in the box.
Then we went to the drift so I could nap. That did not work. Had action most of the night. 9 swordfish bites we’re pretty sure of resulting in 3 slashed baits and 6 hookups including a double. JT Hale pulled the hook on the bigger one while Stan Simmerman caught the smaller one.

It may have been barely legal but we decided to let it go.

Of the 6 hookups, we caught 3. We pulled the hook on one quickly when Chris Boyce went all Roland Martin hookset on it. JT fought a nice one for a bit. Stan had a monster just smoking the 80 before the hook pulled.
We’re pretty sure of the 9 sword bites but there was a 10th that we were sure was a sword. We did catch 2 big hammerheads but they were obviously sharks. The one that fooled us was JT’s second “sword”. When he got it to the boat, it was a nice wahoo. JT’s first ever hoo. That one did fool us but who is expecting a wahoo to eat a drifted strip bait in the middle of the night?
Preston Sparrer caught the biggest sword, a 50 something inch fork length that we kept.
I gave up on the napping, decided there was room for a 4th rod right beside the boat. I rigged up a 50, put the bait down about 30 feet straight down and had a sword on in about 5 minutes. There was some arguing about this one. Hungry people said it was the size of Preston’s and we should keep it. I said it was the size of Stan’s and we should release it. Hungry people decided they wanted to bring it in and measure it. They could have just opened the tuna door and drug it in but instead, Chris kept trying to grab it’s sword and the fish kept trying to cut Chris’s hands off. It was amusing to watch. The fish won and was released. We put the rod back out and the wahoo ate it.
In the morning we went back to jumping off/missing marlin managing to hold onto 1 and picked up some more dolphin.
The photo that does not belong is of Wes Blow. Wes has been catching big sheepshead at the CBBT over the past week. Wednesday, he weighed in a couple over 9.5 pounds. Yesterday, he weighed in a 4-fish limit of citation-sized sheepshead ranging from 10 pounds 13 ounces to 13 pounds 5 ounces.
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