Healthy Grin Sport Fishing

We went offshore with Dr. John Graves to target white marlin. He has a bunch of pop-up satellite tags to deploy. We failed miserably. We only saw two whites and did not get either of them. We did have a good by-catch though. We spent Saturday night at the Norfolk Canyon trolling for bigeye tuna. We had two bites. One was on a teaser. The other ate the right bait. Preston Sparrer fought the fish stand-up with belt and harness. It weighed in at 188 pounds. At first light Sunday morning, we went on the troll for white marlin. We could have loaded the boat with dolphin and we still got a good catch of them, while trying to avoid them. Dr. Graves caught the largest at 31 pounds. While we did not catch a white, a nice blue marlin ate one of our white marlin baits. Hunter Southall caught the blue on a little circle hook and light tackle. We did get a “little” science done when we put out the Clark spoons to see if the young-of-the-year bluefin tuna were around. We caught a lot of little blackfin tuna. We did manage to catch two baby bluefin for the scientists.

It was rough. I spent most of the day trying to stay on the bridge. We caught the one marlin we saw so our hook-up ratio was very good. I did not get any good photos of it as I was holding on whenever it was jumping. We got a DNA sample for VIMS. We had a wahoo hooked up for a bit but the light mono leader was no match for those teeth. We did catch some dolphin. We only saw one other boat out there all day. They did twice what we did, catching two whites.

On our last trip offshore, we were followed around by a whale shark. This weekend, it was a manta ray. We will see manta rays out there sometimes. This one was particularly large and it is the first one that wanted to stay with the boat. Typically they will spook and swim down. Not this one, it swam right up to the transom. It has been like the Georgia Aquarium out there. It would start to swim off and then would do a summersault, like I have watched the manta rays doing in the aquarium in Atlanta, and swim right back. It did this several times. I’m not sure what is going on with these creatures but I wish I could get the marlin up to the boat like that.

We did catch a couple of white marlin and jumped off/pulled off/plain missed others. We caught some dolphin and we caught some tilefish while catching bait. We have been trying to live-bait billfish by catching chub mackerel near the Norfolk Canyon and slow trolling them around. We’ve got the bait catching thing down. The hooking marlin thing, not so much. We’re doing good on sharks. Besides the gentle giant visitors, we have been having plenty of big toothy sharks coming in and eating our mackerels. It is amazing how well a light leader and small circle hooks do with catching big sharks.

While we were slow-trolling for billfish and catching sharks, the Wine, Women and Fishing billfish tournament was going on. Two of the boats trolled near us. One hooked and caught a marlin right beside us…they were happy about it. The tournament was won by the Git-R-Done. They caught a blue marlin and sailfish during tournament time for the win and rounded out their Grand Slam with a white marlin right after lines-out.

It was too rough to go out in the big boat so I went out in the little boat. Chummed for cobia and caught 4. Danny Forehand was near me doing the same thing but with more success, catching 8 to about 50 inches long.

NFL Hall of Fame running back and former Washington Redskins great John Riggins fished with Captain Jorj Head, (757) 262-9004, last week. They caught five nice cobia. “The Diesel” participated in the Virginia Game Fish Tagging Program, collected DNA samples for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and earned a trophy-fish citation award from the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament.

Roger Burnley has a new world record. His 4 pound 6 ounce Spinycheek Scorpionfish has been approved as the All-Tackle World Record by The International Game Fish Association. Roger was fishing at the Norfolk Canyon onboard the Healthy Grin.

This is the second IGFA All-Tackle World Record caught on the Healthy Grin this year. Johnny Boyd established the All-Tackle World Record for Carolina Hake earlier this year with a 5 pound 10 ounce fish. A total of twelve IGFA All-Tackle World Records have been set on the Healthy Grin.

Roger has caught three of the Healthy Grin world-record fish. In addition to his Spinycheek Scorpionfish, Roger has set the world record for snowy grouper twice and he holds the current Snowy Grouper IGFA All-Tackle World Record at 70 pounds 7 ounces.

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.

We went to try live-baiting for white marlin yesterday. While catching chub mackerel, we caught an orange fish…another one. We have been through the blackbelly rosefish and Darwin’s Slimehead (set All-Tackle World Records for both, since retired) and have a pending IGFA record for Spineycheek Scorpionfish. This was none of those.

We caught plenty of chub mackerel to bridle up for bait and managed to not catch any white marlin. We had a couple hooked up but lost them and managed to not hook others. We did catch a blue marlin and 2 of 4 big hammerheads that ate our marlin baits.

Jason Schratwieser, Conservation Director of the IGFA and Virginia Beach native came up with our fish’s id: Deepbody Boarfish. The fish is being donated to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science for their fish collection.

Tricia and I celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary yesterday on into the night. I had every intention of sleeping in today and not fishing. The dang cat decided I was not sleeping in and when I checked my phone there was a text from Wes Blow. He was fishing with Rob Wittman again and they had already caught 8 cobia. Now awake, I threw some rods in the truck, grabbed some eels and drove over to the boat. I started out trolling the oceanfront again, hoping for a king. No luck with that and Wes was up to 10 cobia. I ran into the bay to catch something. I saw a half-dozen cobia and a red drum. Picked a cobia off of the back of a turtle. Got a DNA sample and released it.

Having caught something, I ran back to the ocean front to resume trolling for a king. Rod goes off right away and it is another cobia. Trying to separate the fish and the net from the treble hooks, another rod goes off with another cobia. This one is smaller and the net is tied up so I just swing that one into the boat and it goes crazy. I leave it to do its thing and put the boat in gear with one remaining lure in the water. The little cobia had managed to find the net anyway. With the boat on auto-pilot, I proceed to try and untangle, unhook, and release the fish. I get the bigger fish unhooked and out of the net. Working on that little fish, I manage let it get a hook in my left index finger. I grab the lure with my right hand to keep the thrashing cobia from doing more damage and proceed to get a hook stuck in my right palm. So now, I have both hands impaled on hooks tangled in a net and attached to an irritated cobia. It took a break and I was able to assess the situation.

The hook in the left hand was buried. The one in the right hand was just to the barb so I was able pull that one off. I was then able to cut the hook off in the other hand, freeing me from the fish. It was too deep to pull out but I was able to push it on through and pull it out by the point. Now, I still had to deal with those cobia. The good news is that I was successful without anymore bloodshed and collected DNA samples. I had enough fun and headed in. The really good news, is that Wes and Congressman Wittman ended up catching 15 cobia.

I went over to do a bit of work on the boat today. Afterwards, I did a little trolling along the beach. I caught a really fat red drum and a ribbon fish.