“Right short!” I was excited! A blue marlin was tracking the lure on the right short rigger, and then turned across the boat’s wake and charged in to eat the left short lure. The reel screamed indicating a solid hook-up, and I told first time angler, Ian Coleman, to grab the rod and get harnessed up while I cleared the lines. As I took in the left flat line another blue marlin popped up and grabbed the small lure right behind the boat, heading off in a series of jumps as my jaw dropped in amazement. The right long rigger lure also got eaten and moments later I have three rods running each with a jumping blue marlin on the other end. Ian and I were busy and the third rod was unattended. Where was my son Alex, when I needed him? I relished the adrenaline rush.
Is this Panama, Costa Rica or Venezuela where I am seeing all this action? Absolutely not! I was at the north eastern tip of 12-mile Bank off Grand Cayman in late February.
There were frigate birds wheeling overhead, as skip jacks were plundering the bait fish at the surface. The marlin follow the tunas hoping to catch a stray fish, and I was trolling softhead lures around the edge of the schools of feeding tuna when we were jumped by three marlin, called a “triple header”.
The marlin on the unattended rod soon came off, and shortly afterwards, so did mine, leaving us to concentrate on Ian’s fish that was still dancing on the horizon. I turned the boat in that direction, and speeded up to recover some line. In 20 minutes, Ian had his marlin at the boat, and I took some quick shots to record the catch. An angler’s first blue marlin is a big deal! I removed the single hook, and revived the 160# marlin by the boat before letting it swim off in excellent condition. Ten minutes later we had another blue marlin on, which dumped the reel heading off to Cuba, and I had to chase it at full speed to catch up, and release our second blue for the afternoon. This was tremendous action at the 12-mile Bank.
Blue marlin are available all year round in the Cayman Islands, and back in 2008 my aim was to emphasize this point by catching one marlin each month. In the fall and spring most captains and crews spend time fishing for wahoo and yellow fin tuna, as they are a sure bet, and can be sold to restaurants. But for the angler who wants to catch his first blue marlin, the Cayman Islands offer lots of opportunities. You just need to book one of the good captains and let them know you are targeting blue marlin. The “Hit‘n’ Run” with Captain Derren Ebanks and the “Reel Easy’ with Dwight Ebanks probably catch more blue marlin here than any other charter boats.
Decades ago anglers would land their catch, but with a significant decline in the Atlantic blue marlin population due to over-fishing by commercial long lining activity, 95 per cent of marlin caught by recreational anglers throughout the Caribbean are released alive. In the USA, the sale of Atlantic blue marlin, sailfish and white marlin is banned, and US anglers have to release any blue marlin under 99 inches, fork length, caught anywhere in the Atlantic. A US angler landing a blue marlin in the Cayman Islands below this size, which equates to a fish of about 340 pounds, is breaking US Federal law. Similarly long liners now have to release marlin that are alive at haul back, while targeting tuna and swordfish.
The blue marlin is a cosmopolitan species found in all tropical and subtropical oceans. It is highly valued by sports fisherman because of its large size and spectacular fight when hooked. It is sought in many parts of the world by commercial fishermen because of the high quality of the meat.
Blue marlin grow to 2,500 pounds, the largest caught by rod and reel is 1805 pounds in Hawaii, making it the largest of all game fish. Here in the Cayman Islands in the Western Caribbean the typical blue is around 150 pounds, with a large fish being over 300 pounds, and the Cayman record stands at 584 pounds. I conducted tournament sampling on blue marlin caught in Jamaican and Cayman events from 1976 to 1997 and over 2,000 blue marlin passed my scalpel in that time. Along with many visiting scientists, we were able to learn a great deal about the life history of this oceanic predator, including what they eat, how fast they grow, where and when they spawn and about their genetics.
As an oceanic animal they spawn for several months in summer, the eggs and larvae are planktonic, and the juveniles grow very rapidly, as much as 10mm per day, reaching 70 pounds in their first year. They are opportunistic feeders, and use their speed to overtake a variety of fish and squid. Males stop growing at around 200 to 250 pounds, but females keep going attaining huge sizes, the current Atlantic blue marlin record, caught in Brazil, stands at 1402 pounds.
Always keeping up with international conservation standards, the Cayman Islands Angling Club now has a minimum qualifying weight of 400 pounds for blue marlin in its tournaments. With the majority of marlin here well below that size, this means that 99 per cent of the blue marlin are released here in tournaments.
Do they survive the trauma of being caught? I have been involved for a number of years in post-release mortality studies on billfish in the recreational fishery of many countries. To find out if a marlin or sailfish survives the trauma of capture and release, the fish are tagged with a conventional spaghetti tag. Typically the fish will be recaptured at a later date, and the distance and time at large calculated.
Nowadays, mini computers, called Pop-up Satellite Archival Tags, are put on the marlin, which stay on for a predetermined period, usually several months. The computer collects information on water temperature, depth, and light levels (indicates geo-location), and then disengages from the fish and floats to the surface, where it transmits the collected information to a satellite, which is then downloaded to the research facility.
The marlin does not need to be recaptured to acquire the data. We can now learn if the marlin survived being caught and released, and more importantly how the marlin use the water column to feed, how deep it dives, what happens at night, and where it travels.
This worked perfectly for a blue marlin I tagged off 12 mile Bank last year with a six month tag. The fish went all over the western Caribbean before going north through the Yucatan Channel and the tag popped off exactly on schedule while it was in the Straight of Florida. My Guy Harvey Research Institute has sponsored the deployment of more tags on blue marlin this year to better understand where these fish travel after they pass through the deep waters around the Cayman Islands.
This knowledge has assisted greatly in the management of this family of large oceanic fishes that, like tuna and some species of sharks and turtles, migrate over huge distances each year driven by food availability and reproductive requirements. Highly migratory species like the blue marlin are now managed on a regional basis, rather than by individual countries, because they are fish without boundaries, the nomads of the ocean.
Marlin cannot be kept in captivity for study or public viewing in aquaria, so I have for the last 15 years dived with and filmed these huge fish underwater, not only for reference in my art work but to bring them into people’s living rooms around the world and to educate them about the size, power, beauty and the grace of a species made famous in Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize winning novel The Old Man And The Sea.
It is our collective responsibility to conserve the marine environment and maintain the biodiversity of the planet. Dive safely, fish responsibly. WH
Guy Harvey PhD.
www.guyharvey.com