First Marlin for Kevin
Today we caught the first Marlin for Kevin. He has fished all over the world and caught some amazing fish but Marlin have eluded him – today was the day. We started out with a decent North Easterly blowing and I was expecting it to increase as the day went on. To my surprise it eased off and by early afternoon it had all but glassed out probably due to the approaching weather.
I started out just wide of the Heads again, still hoping for a small Black which again didn’t happen. As we went out the temperature slowly increased but I was surprised that when I reached the shelf there was none of the 27 degrees we had found two days before. The temperature was a much more reasonable 25 C. But there was very little bait and bird activity and the water had a definite greenish tinge.
It was only after I came in from Browns that we found any bait, in fact more than I’d seen for a long time. We trolled around it, not marking anything, for a while to no avail. Then Ron suggested we drop some baits into it.
We had no trouble jigging up a few slimies and soon had one down on a sinker and another free swimming. I couldn’t believe it but in short time the free-swimming bait started acting up and the deep bait rod bent over. We were hooked up then as Ron took up the slack on the free swimmer he found he was hooked up too, we had a double. However, it soon became apparent that one fish had taken both baits.
We cut one line off so that Kevin could fight the Marlin freely. This Marlin just wasn’t fighting as expected being slow and not running, I suspected it might have been gut hooked, very surprising using circle hooks. Anyway, the fight didn’t last long because remnants of the second line got tangled in the boat’s running gear and ended up cutting through Kevin’s line. I can’t describe how disappointing it was. I thought we’d blown Kevin’s chances.
We continued on…I trolled around the bait for a while hoping on hope but we could see the weather moving in and started heading for home.
Just inside the shelf Ron yelled out Marlin. There was a fish following Brad on the shotgun. It followed for a while and Ron eventually teased it into taking the lure. This fish did everything a Marlin is supposed to do and gave Kevin a fight he will remember.
So that was it for the day and as a bonus we made it back just before the storms hit.
Tight lines,
Ivan