By Dale Wills
Anytime I hear someone ask, “How big was the fish?” I’m often reminded of my father and his classic dad joke. Taking his hands from about 12 inches apart and slowly moving them to almost full arms width apart, he would gaze at you with a serious face and say, “It was about that far from the boat and weighed six pounds.”
The Crawgator team with their first place 492.6-pound blue marlin.
Top Captain Landon Bell and Top Mate Connor McLeod, Southern Charm.
Photo: Joe Byrum
By Joe Byrum
When it comes to fishing for blue marlin with lures, the hook set can often be an overlooked part of the equation when things are going right and a heavily scrutinized element when they’re not going so well. Typically, when the latter comes into play a fish has just come off or you had a bite that didn’t translate into a hookup. The deliberation gets even heavier when these things occur in multiple instances during a short period of time. The truth is that some marlin aren’t going to be hooked no matter what we do.
On Saturday morning, the fleet ranging from 18-foot skiffs to 110-foot tricked-out sport fishers waited, eager to speed across the flat Sea of Cortez.
May 17, 2022, Loreto B.C.S —Sunday concluded the third Marina Puerto Escondido Fishing Tournament as 51 Teams competed for over a half-million dollars in cash prizes, the highest ever awarded for a fishing tournament in the Loreto area. According to Stenson Hamann, marketing manager of the event, “The attendance has grown 85 percent over its short three-year history, beginning in 2019.”
Black marlin have wide, powerful bills built for smashing tuna and not breaking.
ITB Staff
They say that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they present themselves. A few observations about the anatomy of a fish can just as accurately provide ways to approximate how they behave. There is an adage in biology that form follows function. The way something appears can tell you quite a bit about what it is good at doing.
By Barry Weshnak Miss Annie owner
When I was eight or nine years old my dad started taking me fishing off Long Branch pier in Long Branch, New Jersey for fluke during the summer and at night during the winter for ling and whiting. It was so cold that the nylon line would freeze between the water and the reel. We drank a lot of hot chocolate and enjoyed our fishing time together. In my teens, my future brother-in-law, Frank, me and a buddy of ours who had a wooden skiff with an outboard motor fished off Monmouth Beach for stripers. The love of saltwater fishing took root as a family affair.
By Captain Kevin Deerman
Two things constantly changing our industry are technology and innovation. Fishing will always be fishing, but with all of the advancements there are many more crews traveling farther, faster and more comfortably and easily than ever before.
January 14 – 16, 2022—Marina Pez Vela, Quepos Costa Rica – Excitement and anticipation was in the air as 83 of the world’s top sport fishing teams assembled in Quepos, Costa Rica for the 6th annual Pelagic Rock Star Offshore Tournament. Located on the Pacific coast of central Costa Rica, Marina Pez Vela and the surrounding area of Manuel Antonio National Park is known as one of the most biologically diverse places anywhere in the world, and the fishing is second to none. Open to the public, Marina Pez Vela is a super clean, modern, world-class yacht harbor with a wide variety of restaurants, bars, and shops – including a PELAGIC brand store – which makes it the perfect back drop for the sportfishing history that was about to be made.
NOAA Southeast Fisheries, Jan. 14, 2022—Anyone involved in a tagging program is excited when they get a report of a recapture since these are the lynchpin of a volunteer, constituent based program. So when scientists with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center were notified just after Thanksgiving that a few tagged sailfish had been recaptured, they were thrilled.
