Numbers at a glance: Billfish 51%, Dorado 74%, Tuna 30%, Wahoo 10%
Overall Catch Success Rate All Species Combined 94%
BILLFISH: Wow, what a week! As most of you know Bisbee took place this past week and we have written a lot about it already, but not everybody enters the big bucks competition, so how did our regular clients do? In one word, fabulous. We had some of the best catches of the year, starting with Pisces Rebecca with a 566 LB blue marlin the day before the Bisbee Tournament, for angler George Hansen from Idaho Falls. Captain Jose Ramon saw the fish jump a mile away and thought it was a manta ray, as they got closer he realized it was a blue marlin that was feeding and quickly dropped back a tuna they had boated earlier in the day. George went to work and after about an hour, the crew realized there was something wrong; the fish had died. They pulled in the line by hand to find that the leader had wrapped around the tail, meaning the fish had been pulled backwards and drowned. Next day Giles Patterson from Cincinnati was fishing aboard Pisces La Brisa and was having fun with his group setting out cedar plugs and pulling in school size tuna. As he was reeling in a 15 lb. tuna, a huge marlin emerged from the depths and swallowed his tuna, cedar plug and all. Giles puffed away for over four hours until the fish could not be seen and was not reacting; the marlin had expired and again they guys had to hand line it up. To their surprise it was much bigger than they thought tipping the scales at 591 LBS. Next day out, it was another 31 ft. Bertram this time Pisces Tracy Ann, that had a blue marlin, but they were successful in releasing the approximately 360 LB fish. Attitude Adjustment & La Brisa went on to release blue marlin around the 300 LB mark later in the week and Shambala had three blues a little under 300 LBS which they released. It was nice to see a return of the striped marlin this past week too, the catches being usually a single fish plus numbers of dorado or tuna; some boats had two fish and only Yahoo managed to release three in one day. Our total billfish catch was of 65 fish, consisting of 51 striped marlin, 11 blue marlin & 4 sailfish.
OTHER SPECIES: Great numbers again this week on dorado, making it our number one catch with seventy four percent of boats catching between one and twenty five fish between 15 and 35 LBS; our total dorado catch was 535 fish. Pacific side was were the dorado were concentrated with bait & green colored lures working well. Yellow fin tuna catches took a step up this week, which is great news for the upcoming tuna tournament. Thirty percent of boats found school size fish and had fun catching up to thirty five in a day. Some fish were large, such as a 125 lb’er caught aboard Pisces Ruthless by Richard Hartley from South Africa – our total tuna count was 298. Wahoo catches complimented the rest of the catches with ten percent of our boats catching fish up to 40 lbs.
WEATHER CONDITIONS: Clear skies, seas mostly calm, with some chop in the afternoons.
LOCATION: Pacific, lighthouse to San Jaime.
BEST LURES: Petrolero, green, live bait, cedar plugs.
AVERAGE WATER TEMP: 83 F
