It’s safe to say that Australian black marlin are taking the entire IGFA Great Marlin Race (IGMR) by storm!

When the IGMR first began in 2011, one 261 kg blue marlin that swam 4,776 nautical miles (nm) has occupied the title ofLongest Track in IGMR History. Since that time, 172 other billfish have been tagged during 27 events in 16 countries, and not one fish has been able to bump that blue out of its First Place title..until now!

Just last week, a tag popped up about 1,700 nm off the coast of Chile to reveal that a 499 kg black marlin tagged off the coast of Queensland, Australia swam a whopping 5,716 nm across the Pacific Ocean, almost reaching South America in just 180 days! Not only has this distance broken the IGMR’s 100,000 nm milestone and taken first place in the IGMR, but this is the longest linear point of deployment to point of reporting distance ever recorded on a billfish by an electronic tag! With nine more tags due to report in the next  four months, there’s still a very good chance that sponsor Ernesto Bertarelli of The Bertarelli Foundation might be this year’s 2014-2015 winner.

Stay tuned to the 2014 Lizard Island, Australia Race page where four tracks on the IGMR Global Leaderboard will be added to the google-earth satellite map once the data has been processed.