Ok ,let's lighten things up with a blue marlin story , for years my dream was to catch a blue marlin , I had caught striped marlin in Mexico and lots of other pelagic saltwater species , I hadn't caught a blue marlin but thought that would be the dream catch , years went by and I didn't have the opportunity to catch one .....
I found myself working on a 60 ft commercial / sport fishing boat in the north east , the destination was the continental shelf an area approximately 60 to 80 miles south of Montauk New York , one of the worlds finest fishing destinations, I think it was about a decade earlier that my last shot at a blue marlin was on board a charter boat in Kona Hawaii , inhu nui captain by the famous Hawaiian legend Freddy rice....but no marlin
So back at the veatch canyon out around 80 miles south , at the continental shelf known as the canyons , crew and I were targeting big eye tuna , a true trophy fish , pound for pound one of the most powerful tuna in the ocean and highly prized for its sushi quality tuna...
On that particular day we had a charter , about 5 pm one of the 11 penn international 80 reels went off , a huge blue marlin grabbed a bob Schneider jet lure , I put a guest in the fighting chair but the captain screamed at the guests to clear the deck and put me in the chair to make sure we didn't loose the fish , he wasn't taking any chances ....
I settled in and fought the fish for 3 hours , usuall pandemonium , black clouds of choking diesel
Rocking 6 ft swells , near exhausting fight , leaping , screaming , puking , all of it ,real Hemingway stuff....
After about 3 hours finally got the fish to the boat , unfortunately she died from the fight , I nearly did also , hoisting the fish up to the deck took another half hour , everybody was beat up from the fish , it weighed in at about 800 lbs, pretty big as Atlantic blue marlin in the summer get real big , but rarely that. Size....
After clean up , dinner now 100 miles offshore and everybody exhausted , I was reflecting on my achievement. , feeling a little bad that that beauty died , but still couldn't believe that I landed it , got a couple of high fives , and was told that was a fish of a lifetime and it turns out it was,
So now everybody goes to sleep and it's part of my job to stay awake all night , chunking pieces of bait to attract yellowfin tuna to the back of the boat , and wake up the other crew and charter guests if I can get the tuna attracted to the boat , usually happens at 3 or 4 am , so I was really beat , and the night becomes surreal ,pitch black one min and then pitch black with a thousand stars half up half down , and having auditory hallucinations between the generator hum , the porpoise squealing all around , the wind howling , it's freaky out there....
So in the spotlight I see this 20/25 pound Mahi Mahi, a tough bastard of a gamefish , I would venture to say pound for pound , kicks blue Marlins ass , so if there was ever a 800 lb mahi, Mahi,
I think the marlin would run for the hills , these fish are tough bastards, and this little fucker is just staring at me foe about an hour in the dark , just circling around eating my chunked up bait but won't let me catch him with a hook ,so I see a school of squid rush by , like 100 of them , so. Grab a tiny lightweight 10 lb class rod with at tiny jig and snag a squid , I see the Mahi, make a mad dash to eat my squid just before I pull the squid up out of the water , now it's just me , the entire Atlantic and this squid in my hand and this Mahi, and off goes the Mahi, he's gone , 15 min later he comes back and I frantically grab the undersized rod and tie off a circle hook and stick the gamakatsu hook in mr squids butt , flip him over , and the second the live bait hits the water mr Mahi smashes him and it's fight on , that sucker ripped off line like crazy made a minimum of 6 airborne acrobatic leaps and took me 40 min to get him boat side , once there I had to balance the rod in my left hand and gaff him in the head with my right , flipped him on the boat , he went absolutely ballistic , sending me inside the salon and finally coming out with aluminum baseball bat in hand to subdue him , finally got him in the ice box , sat down , in the dark , blood and fish puke all over the place , cracked open a beer , looking at what just happened I realized that fight that tough Mahi was more fun and exciting than landing the 800 lb blue .......
Then I started thinking about the first smallmouth I caught when I was a kid , started thinking , fishings not about trophy so , it's about the connection with a worthy opponent , size is meaningless , it's all the same emotion whether it's a 3 lb bass a 25 lb Mahi, or a 800 lb blue marlin ......