Obald, I think I would trade living in London for living in Northland in a heartbeat... BTW, how is your outrigger project going?

White Marlin are a grand little fish!  I don't suppose you Kiwis would give up your 200 pound stripeys for them, but they are real flyers on light tackle.  They're far stronger and faster than sailfish, and much prettier too, their fins and tail, and often their body can take on this wonderful neon blue glow that's simply gorgeous to see.  They're bold enough to attack big marlin lures and aggressive enough to strike again and again, yet real hard to hook if the hooks and tackle are too big and heavy.  They are tons of fun on up to a light 30# stand up outfit, but I don't know how you would land one in five minutes on 15 or even 20# gear fishing off a dead boat! 

cheers - dustin

White marlin are a lot of fun on light gear but believe it or not they are considered a pest in some places, especially around about now in The Azores where big blues are the target fish. A friend of mine fished tease and switch for three days ignoring every white marlin to get three 700lbs blues. He reckons the whitey's passed up could well have been in excess of a hundred! I don't know what the entry fee for the Ocean City Tournament is now but in the mid 1996 it was $750 per boat with various betting levels up to $5000. In those days to cover the board it would cost $9750 all in. Interestingly even though the tournament runs for 5 days you can only fish a maximum of 3. So if you do well in the first 3 days you could wait a nervous 48 hours awaiting the final outcome.

 

 

Last season there seemed to be plenty of shortbills in the 5-10kg bracket ...mine was just a smidgeon over 12kg

The biggest caught in NZs waters was by Leonie Patterson on charter boat Tagit in 1999 and went 33.80kg which also takes out the WR women's 37kg record.

John, 100 whites raised in three days, wow that's hot!  Might that blue you saw have been Kevin Nakamaru's 1,170 taken aboard the "Pesca Grossa"?  Those who saw it say that it had a whitey in its gullet.  I think the European record whitey has been bumped up to 90+ (Trevor Housby's fish dated back to 1985/1986) but I'm sure bigger will eventually be weighed in, probably either from the Azores/Madeira or from the Algarve coast of Portugal, they've got some goodsized ones there.  The nicest one I saw last year was a hefty critter that might have nudged 100#, it ate a large tube off the long rigger on 130 and had us wondering what it was for a few seconds.  It "Palm Beach Released" itself before I could get the gaff, ha ha.  There were quite a few around in that period in mid August- I sure miss fishing those feisty little guys.

cheers - dustin

Hi John, could you please say hi to Russ for me next time you see him?  I was in Ireland the same weekend Russ was passing through the UK en route to Cairns so I wasn't able to get the full and complete lowdown on how his season went in Madeira this year. 

Yes, the "Briso do Mar" is still pottering around the grounds with her oddball selection of tackle.  I believe she still runs with the same deckhand you must have fished with, too.  I've been racking my brains to remember his name but it escapes me, Fernando, maybe? 

cheers - dustin

hi ya John...

Seems you have had plenty of experience fishing for Atlantic blues and whites - how many of each have you caught and how do they compare to NZs humble striped marlin?....please post some photos of the whites you have caught as not many of us have had the pleasure of seeing what the look like!

thanks.

Kerren most of the places I fished were at times when the marlin were not around but before I came to NZ I had caught a few small blues and whites in the Carribean and Bahamas. There is no replacement for a blue marlin that's why they call them Ferraris but then when it comes to stripies there's none to beat what we get here. Matt will tell you we were lucky to get a lot of big striped marlin this year but there is no comparison to a blue going ballistic and I would suggest at the risk of being contentious, that the NZ blue marlin if you are lucky to hook one, fights harder and more frantically than the one found in more tropical climes. Dustin I have seen more amazing bill-fishing in NZ than anywhere else, the grass ain't necessarily greener abroad and NZ has consistently performed for decades. On top of that some of the techniques used elsewhere don't sit too well with me. Anyway there is nowhere else to get a world class broadbill, nor striped marlin, nor mako, nor Yellowtail Kingfish and if I ever tire of catching them buggers I'll go back to the Tarpon in the Florida or maybe NZ's absolute favourite---------- carp fishing!

John, interesting observation about NZ blue marlin fighting harder than other places, I've heard that argument backwards so to speak, some folks think that Madeiran blues don't fight so hard, and so the experts say, it's because of the cooler water.  I tend to think the so-called wimpy Madeiran blue phenomenon is probably because of expert boat handling and correctly applied, correctly sized tackle, if one wants to get into 4/5 hour marathon fights, it's entirely possible.  All that being said; Russ thought the Ghana blues scrapped harder than Madeiran ones, and he'd caught enough of both to know.

cheers- dustin

Ah, the days of wooden rods and iron men!  Personally, though I'm sure that statement was true to a certain extent, I'm not totally convinced the oldtimers were as disadvantaged by the tackle they used, which was without doubt an enormous hassle to keep in good nick, but I'm sure worked pretty effectively when it was.  Line class selected for big fish was normally heavy, the standard seems to have been linen line in 39 thread (about 130# class), and I'm sure that non stretch linen line could really put the hurt on a fish, with rods to match.  Reels included the two speed Fin Nor, which had been around since 1933.   As for angling technique and boat handling, guys like Glassell, Lerner and Farrington caught literally hundreds of really big fish, swordfish, marlin and giant tuna- I've never read anything Glassell wrote but I've read Farrington and found it amazing that so much of what he had to say about not only fighting a fish but general angling technique still holds true after over 50 years.  They weren't just heavy tackle experts, Farrington recommended that white marlin should ideally be fished with down to six thread (20# class).  He at least did go for over 3 hours on at least two fish, a grander class black (fought for the last couple of hours with a reel with a busted anti-reverse) and a foul hooked swordfish, and I wonder whether any of the fish Glassell lost took him over three hours.  Boat handling, well, in places like Chile and Peru, it might have been iffy at first, but the same anglers fished in the eastern Atlantic where skippers like Gifford had figured out how to boat bluefin tuna in the Bahamas in fast time with aggressive boat handling and heavy drag as early as the 1940s.  There were a lot of fish to practice on in those days, so many fish that the numbers they speak of seem almost incredible to today's reader, it's not at all surprising that top anglers and skippers got real good at fighting them.

cheers- dustin