Well today is the last day before The Antigua and Barbuda Sport Fishing Tournament. It is the 41st year that the club has been holding these events and this year looks like it will be a pretty big one with entries from most of the nearby islands taking part. Of course if you have been reading the previous blog entries then you will know that our company is sending off one of its boats to compete once again and has been doing quite a bit of preparation and training. Team Xtreme
Caribbean Real Estate has been on the water four times now including this morning’s session. Our lures, rods, reels and crew are all polished and totally ready to win this event and today we solidified our confidence by catching and releasing another marlin. We took the boat up from Jolly Harbour at about 7 am this morning and set out South of Falmouth Harbour once we had gotten up the coast. We were looking for FADs (as explained earlier this week) as well as blue marlin. We searched and searched pulling our huge marlin lures over miles of Atlantic without any luck only spotting some atlantic spotted dolphins jumping next to the boat. I tried to get my cam out but by the time i got it all set up i only could manage the one funny looking shot above. At about 11:30 we found a FAD out in the middle of nowhere obviously set by some French fishermen from Guadeloupe. After marking it on my GPS we trolled up to a mile away from it in criss crosses hoping to hook up with a marlin that may have been feeding near to the FAD. After about 25 minutes when we were starting to lose interest the top rod with the famous Black Bart “Grander Candy” lure started to scream as a big fish tried to pull of all its line. I looked back about a hundred meters behind and saw a big silver flash beneath a wave as john let out a expletive signaling that we had lost the fish. The big marlin had “spat the hook” as they say, but it have us some home that there may be some action at this FAD after all. I re-traced my GPS track a few more times and a little while later we saw a huge yellowfin tuna rocket out of the water just off our port side. There were fish here, and we decided to give it a few more runs. All of a sudden rod #1 took started making a hellish noise as the line started vanishing from its gold spool…this line loss could only come from a blue marlin and we were hooked into a good one once again. This time it was Tony on the rod, and in no time he was in the harness and fighting with David helping out.
Tony did a text book example of proper stand-up marlin fighting and had the fish at the boat within 25 minutes.
It was a fairly short stout fish which they all said had to be about 250 lbs. We easily took the hook out and gave it a little pull through the water before it sped off with a few waves of its tail.
For the second time this week we had released a blue marlin and once again we were all elated. We had nothing more to do today and knew that it was time to go in.
Team Caribbean Real Estate was gonna register for the tournament and relax with our deserved confidence to carry us through until the bimini start tomorrow. There will be free rum on offer thanks to Mount Gay from 4:30 pm today until the skipper’s meeting at 6:30 pm. Of course our Xtreme team has to take part in all aspects of this tournament so I will post this entry and be off. Rum cant be released! I will try to post something about tomorrow’s fishing later tomorrow when we get in. “Tight lines”.
Well today is the last day before The Antigua and Barbuda Sport Fishing Tournament. It is the 41st year that the club has been holding these events and this year looks like it will be a pretty big one with entries from most of the nearby islands taking part. Of course if you have been reading the previous blog entries then you will know that our company is sending off one of its boats to compete once again and has been doing quite a bit of preparation and training. Team Xtreme Caribbean Real Estate has been on the water four times now including this morning’s session. Our lures, rods, reels and crew are all polished and totally ready to win this event and today we solidified our confidence by catching and releasing another marlin. We took the boat up from Jolly Harbour at about 7 am this morning and set out South of Falmouth Harbour once we had gotten up the coast. We were looking for FADs (as explained earlier this week) as well as blue marlin. We searched and searched pulling our huge marlin lures over miles of Atlantic without any luck only spotting some atlantic spotted dolphins jumping next to the boat. I tried to get my cam out but by the time i got it all set up i only could manage the one funny looking shot above. At about 11:30 we found a FAD out in the middle of nowhere obviously set by some French fishermen from Guadeloupe. After marking it on my GPS we trolled up to a mile away from it in criss crosses hoping to hook up with a marlin that may have been feeding near to the FAD. After about 25 minutes when we were starting to lose interest the top rod with the famous Black Bart “Grander Candy” lure started to scream as a big fish tried to pull of all its line. I looked back about a hundred meters behind and saw a big silver flash beneath a wave as john let out a expletive signaling that we had lost the fish. The big marlin had “spat the hook” as they say, but it have us some home that there may be some action at this FAD after all. I re-traced my GPS track a few more times and a little while later we saw a huge yellowfin tuna rocket out of the water just off our port side. There were fish here, and we decided to give it a few more runs. All of a sudden rod #1 took started making a hellish noise as the line started vanishing from its gold spool…this line loss could only come from a blue marlin and we were hooked into a good one once again. This time it was Tony on the rod, and in no time he was in the harness and fighting with David helping out.
Great pics of Tony! Hope you did well this weekend!
ReplyDeleteJodi