 The Blue Marlin fishing continues to be very good. Today, Jeff Ferris from Kansas chartered HighNoon for a 3/4 day charter. We caught a nice 5 lb. skipjack tuna and I decided to put it out as live bait. While putting it out, a sneaky 400 lb Blue Marlin inhaled it and began jumping before I could even put the rubber band in the clip. We watched as this Blue jumped right near the boat and threw our live bait back at us. Knowing that live baiting was hot, we caught another skipjack tuna and put it out as live bait. That one took about two hours...but then went off with a bang! Unfortunately, it turned out to be about a 300 lb. Tiger Shark which we brought to the boat and released. Funny, a few days before, Bill and Carrie Nell from Honolulu fought a 800 lb Tiger Shark for over an hour before it cut the line.
On one of my best charters lately, Steve Long and his wife from Houston, Texas had reserved HighNoon for a full day charter and hit the jackpot! We were live baiting off the Keauhou ledge with two 8 lb skipjack tuna. After about two hours, I was thinking maybe we should change over to trolling....but that thought didn't last very long. First, our downrigger bait went off and I put Steve in the fighting chair as this huge marlin put white water everywhere as it screamed line off the reel. We quickly started clearing the second live bait when another Blue Marlin slammed it and now we had two Blue Marlin on at one time. I decided to get the smaller one to the boat first since we were going to take that fish for some friends of mine who wanted it for poki (native Hawaiian food dish) for a large party this coming weekend. I exchanged rods with Steve so he could fight that fish and get it to the boat. It came up in about 20 minutes..and we pulled that one into the boat. I then transferred the bigger fish to Steve and he did a great job of getting that fish to the boat for a release. However, this fish had swallowed the hook and unfortunately, we were unable to release it unharmed. So..we headed back to the dock and weighed in two Blue Marlin...one weighing in at 258 lbs and the other....a giant 741 1/2 lbs! That is 999.5 five lbs of fish at the same time. See photo below!
Overall, the outlook for October is excellent. If you are a Blue Marlin type of guy or gal, Kona is the place to be this fall! |
