Well, we just fished two tournaments in July, and the blues bit really good. Unfortunately, the first tournament was the Van Wormer Dorado shootout, and the Dorado seemed to be on another planet. We literally trolled close to 800 miles in some of the best water that the East Cape could offer and only hooked two Dorado! You cannot say that is full speed for a killer tournament that is held every year with a great show of over 150 teams. People come from all over the planet to fish these particular pelagic species; and Mexico could learn a lot from Panama, if they ban longline fishing altogether. This practice is so prehistoric, in fact, it would be equivalent to someone burning down the forest to have all the game jump off a cliff. Give these apex predators a chance and they could make Mexico a prime destination for high dollar sportfishing operations, and many future anglers to come to every year.
As for the marlin fishing, we seemed to raise quite a few fish again this July, but again we just didn’t raise the right fish on the right day. We started our trip up to Palmas De Cortez with trolling through the Iman area and ended up on the pick at Frailes. The next morning we immediately raised a nice blue on the stinger and it was maybe a 400# class blue, it peeled so much top shot and this fish meant business. It did the usual arching to the left- see ya later move, and she jumped on the mainline. What really sucked is that we lost our brand new Matsura large blue marlin scoot. Not a bad way to start the day, but a bummer to loose a nice fish and a new lure. The fishing seemed to be spread out pretty good on the grid, and we had many bites close to La Ribera. We even venture all the way to the top of Cerralvo Island, and pulled into La Paz when Hurricane Dora started to come our way. The winds and swell came up pretty big as Dora approached, so we had to make way for the fuel dock of Costa Baja in La Paz. When we left La Paz, we fished the reef on the north side of Ceralvo and fished the canyons down the line toward the 88 for two stripers, and a small blue. We settled back into Palmas De Cortez and started to pre-fish for the East Cape Offshore. It was all pointing to Punta Arena and south for the blue marlin, and we already had several biters in that zone. We managed to raise three blues on the sunday following the shootout with the team loosing all of them. We all started to scratch our heads, check out all of our rigs, and wonder what we were doing wrong.
When it came up to the East Cape Offshore we managed 17 bites with 10 of them being blue marlin 5 striper bites, and a couple of dorado. Of those biters we only released 3 blues and 4 stripers. I was relying solely on our new Maxsea TimeZero software for almost any data that we needed, in fact, it gave me more data than if I was using everything you could gather on the internet. What an amazing tool to have onboard, we would mark every blue marlin bite on this and simply pound that area. During the East Cape, we only managed 4-5 bites as it slowed down, but we had a great release on day one with Rich in the chair. Remember, there was only 38 blues released for 61 boats over three days… that equals 38 blue releases for over a half a year of fishing! But, this scrappy little blue tore across the transom in front of all of us, and it put on a killer show. After that, we started our trip back to Puerto Los Cabos and managed to raise a couple of beauties. The first one bit the stinger and pulled 35 pounds of drag like a laser beam, she was gone and did a right to left hook throwing head shake. She was gone after pulling 200 yards of top-shot and having everyones attention. Next, 35 minutes and a few more miles, and the short right corner went off after a 180 degree switch back bite from a really big girl. This time she took us to spectra in 10 seconds, and she had to be the most impressive fish we have seen in years. We were all getting to battle stations and it ended as quickly as it started; unfortunately, we had a bad terminal tackle failure. So, on this trip we witnessed a career of tackle failures, but it will only make this team stronger and better. To witness 14 hookups of blue marlin in 11 full days of fishing with almost half pushing well over 300#, a couple over 400#, and even one over 500# is awesome. We could have released 8 of the 14 without some of our bad luck, but at least it didn’t happen during the tournaments.
Thanks first to Rich, Ballast Point beers, DeepSea, Pelagic, Maui Jim, Rock Sake, Jack and Yuseff for coming down, Horace, Nick, Stevo, our awesome boat, Furuno, and Palmas De Cortez for making this year so much fun!
Big bites, and screaming drags,
Capt. Alex Edwards
