Walter and Lynne fished last Thursday with me and unfortunately we got skunked. They are the parents of Dan Preiss who fished with me a few weeks ago. On that trip, Dan fought nice blue marlin for about an hour before it came off that we estimated at 500lbs or more. Today was Walter and Lynne’s second day out and we had high hopes of getting into something…anything. We trolled our way south and found a nice porpoise school. We fished them for a while but no luck. So off we headed to one of the nearby buoys to live bait. The buoy was holding a lot of small tunas so we trolled smaller lures to try and catch a few. Again, no luck. Maybe the bait fish were more worried about predators than feeding. So, when all else fails, go to jigging. I got Walter set up on the jig and he caught 2 nice ahis on his first two drops. I put the small tunas in our tuna tubes to use for bait at a later time. As I was about to drop the jig back in the water a large shape cruised by the corner of the boat no more than 12 feet away. It was a big blue marlin looking for something to eat. I quickly rigged one of the tunas Walter had just caught and threw it out. The bait hit the water and we all watched as the marlin turned on a dime and inhaled the bait right next to the boat. The fish peeled out almost half a spool of line on it’s initial run and came up jumping about 300 yards away. Wally was up in the chair and fought the fish to leader in about 30 minutes.
As we brought it up near the boat we noticed it was missing it’s bill. It probably lost it in a fight with another fish when it was smaller. Walter’s fish weighed 447lbs!
