One of our good friends and customer of Jesse Brown’s Outdoors sent us an email on his latest adventure, fishing for black marlin. You can check out his story below and make sure to click the Youtube link to watch the video at the end.
Email-
I want to follow-up on our conversation and tell you more about my black marlin fishing trip to the Great Barrier Reef. When I was ten years old I used to watch The American Sportsman on ABC on Saturday afternoons. You may remember this show. It documented all sorts of outdoor activities that centered around hunting and fishing. One of the episodes was about black marlin fishing off the Great Barrier Reef. I remember promising myself that I would go on a trip like that if I ever had the chance.
I had the opportunity to do so in 2008 and again this year. Each of these trips was all that I thought it would be. They really did prove to be the trips of a lifetime.
The Reader’s Digest version of this expedition is that you fly to Cooktown, Australia, board a 50-foot sportfisherman and cruise out one hour to the east to the Great Barrier Reef. You troll up and down the reef all day for five days. You are fishing about one-half to one mile from the reef in water that is roughly 100 feet deep. At night you pull in behind the reef and anchor up, typically with several other fishing boats. The water is dead calm, the stars are unbelievable and the fishing stories flow with the beer and the wine. In the morning you have breakfast and go snorkeling on the reef because the marlin don’t become active until late morning. At 11 AM you pull anchor and make the ten minute trip outside the reef. It’s not a bad way to spend the week.
It is hard to explain the fishing part of the trip because the scale of the fish you are after is almost unbelievable. The goal is to catch a 1,000 pound fish, affectionately know as a “grander”. Of course, not every fish is a grander. The males only weigh 300 to 500 pounds. You get the idea of the scale of the fishery.
To try to explain this I have three things for you.
The first is the following email, which I sent to Don Yager on October 22nd. It has a link to a video of a fish that one of the boats we anchored up with, the Little Audrey, caught two days before we saw them. This video is definitely worth watching:
I think you have seen this video as we discussed on the phone this afternoon, http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/36874/giant+marlin+goes+berserk+leaps+onto+fishing+boat+off+australia/ .
This boat, the Little Audrey, tied up with us on Sunday night, two days before this film was made. This boat is very similar in size and make up to the boat that we were on, The Iceman. Our first mate knew the first mate on the Little Audrey very well.
This is exactly what happens when you hook up with a black marlin with the exception that the fish doesn’t usually jump into the cockpit. Our Captain told us that this had happened to him twice in his 29 years of marlin fishing. You hook into the fish then the Captain backs the boat down on it because there is no way you can reel a fish this big to the boat. When backing down in 15 to 18 foot seas, which is what we had on every day I have been marling fishing, water pours over the transom into the cockpit of the boat. This adds to the excitement of the situation.
We only caught two fish. One was a 600 pounder, the same size as the fish in this video. The other was a grander, which my son and I had a “double” on as it was hooked twice in the mouth having eaten the baits on both the left and the right outrigger. That fish jumped twice not more than 25 feet from the boat. There is no way to describe how awesome it is to see something that big (12 feet long), fast and powerful up close. It is the most incredible thing I have ever seen in the ourdoor world.
This video shows exactly what the experience is like with the exception that the fish doesn’t usually try to jump into the cockpit of the boat. Remember, this is a 600-pound fish, which is huge as you can see. However, it isn’t a grander.
The second bit of info is an email that I sent my wife that explains what happened when my son and I caught a “grander double”. It was an unbelievable experience. After we cut the fish loose for the second time our Captain told me that we may be the two luckiest people on the face of the earth that day. An occurrence like this is very rare according to him.
Fuzzy had the first turn to catch a fish and we hooked up about 2 PM on the first day. We typically troll three baits behind the boat and the left-hand bait went off first. About ten seconds later the right bait went off. I thought that the left bait had hooked the fish and that the marlin had subsequently gotten tangled up in the right line.
Fuzzy got into the fighting chair and strapped in to fight the fish. The deck mate asked me to wind the reel on the right bait, which stayed in the rod holder on the right rail, so it didn’t get completely tangled up during the fight. Fuzzy did all of the work and I just reeled along when I could, enjoying his fight.
When Fuzzy got the fish to the back of the boat about 25 minutes later it jumped completely out of the water not 25 feet away! The mate saw that the marlin had actually swallowed both baits and was hooked in the mouth twice…and it was a “grander”, a 1,000 pound fish! A fish this size is the ultimate prize in black marlin fishing.
To see that fish out of the water at such a close range was absolutely awesome, really indescribable! The fish was incredibly fast and powerful, easily 12 feet from bill to tail.
When it was at the back of the boat the crew cut Fuzzy’s line and moved me and my rod to the fighting chair. The fish got a second wind and it ran off again. It took me another 15 minutes to get it back to the boat, where it jumped again not 25 feet away. The mate cut the line and we had a father/son double Grander. The crew said that this was incredibly rare and that it was their first 1,000 pound fish of the season.
The last piece of info is a video of a 500-pound fish that another guy on our boat caught. It is a little slow in the beginning. Advance the film to the 3:30 mark and the action picks up. You can see the fish clearly in the water at the end of the film. This gives you an idea of the size and power of black marlin. I am still amazed everytime I watch this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGSw5TDzIU0
That is a lot to swallow in one email and may be more than you want to know. However, I can tell you that this trip isn’t like any other outdoor adventure trip I have ever made. It takes a little explaining to help people understand what this is all about.
