Success With Marlin

Story and photos by John E. Philips

Want to become a great marlin fisherman?Start by putting in some extra effortand paying attention to the details.

How do you become a great marlin fisherman? Sure, you must put in time on the water, but many offshore anglers do this yet never become truly proficient at finding and catching marlin. To become great you need to work harder than anyone else, just like Paul Mitchell of the hair-product industry did when he went from living out of his car to becoming a billionaire. I’ll never forget an interview he did several years ago with Barbara Walters on “20/20.” When Walters asked Mitchell how he climbed from abject poverty to great wealth, he replied, “It was the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do to get rich in America is to do the things no one else wants to do. No one wants to go to work early, stay late, miss a lunch break, work on a holiday, clean the toilets or work more than 40 hours a week. If you’ll just do the things no one else wants to do, you’ll have more money than anyone else.”

The same philosophy applies to marlin fishing. To move from your status as a “good” marlin fisherman to a great marlin fisherman, you just have to work harder than the good marlin fishermen.

Identify Their Habitat

To find marlin you must locate cobaltblue water where they swim and feed, and seek out grass lines and rips that hold schools of baitfish. To best identify the water and the structure where you’ll find marlin, hire a pilot, charter a plane, and fly over the areas where you expect to see the blue water, grass lines, and rips. In one hand have a chart of the area, and in the other have a hand-held GPS receiver. As you fly over likely looking places to fish, mark potential marlin locations as waypoints on your GPS. Many of today’s modern hand-held GPS receivers such as those from Lowrance and Bushnell have navigation charts built into them complete with buoy locations, oil and gas platform designations, and bottom contours. Then when you mark a grass line or a watercolor change as a waypoint, you can figure out the distance of that waypoint from your planned port of departure.

Scouting for marlin is a lot like scouting for deer sign. If you can pick out the locations where you think the deer hold before you begin hunting, you save hours of mindless walking through the woods. Likewise, pinpointing likely looking marlin haunts will pay off. Although rips change, grass lines move, and bait constantly swims, finding likely marlin water before leaving port provides a better starting point for your hunt.

You can also use the internet to gain marlin-fishing information before you fish. Do your homework. Find out where anglers most frequently catch marlin at the time of year under the weather and water conditions you expect to encounter. As you learn more about marlin and the areas where you’ll fish, use your computer to build a database. Enter the times, dates, places, water conditions, wind conditions, moon phases and tides associated with catching marlin. The more information you can enter into your database, the better you can predict where marlin will hold when you plan to fish for them.

Don’t over look the valuable information that state or federal marine biologists assigned to the area where you plan to fish might be able to provide. Marine biologists learn everything they can about where, when, why and under what conditions marlin will show up in a specific region and they have a handle on research others are conducting.

Build Contacts

Get to know the marlin fishermen in the ports you frequently fish. You can often find a captain, deck hand or individual angler who know the ropes. I once went on a great marlin trip with Captain Jack Simmons on the charter boat Baby Grand out of Biloxi, Mississippi. Generally you would expect to find blue marlin along the Upper Gulf Coast off the Continental Shelf, but the year that we fished the South and the Midwest experienced a very dry spring and summer. Consequently, not a lot of fresh water had come down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico and thus the blue water had pushed in very close to shore. “In the past weeks, we’ve had some great marlin action in 350 feet of water,” Simmons explained at the time. “The baitfish have moved in closer to shore, and the marlin have followed them. Finding them in water that shallow is fairly unusual during the summer months.”

By the time we reached the mouth of the Mississippi from Biloxi and put our lines out, we only had half a day left in which to fish. In the first 15 minutes we hooked a blue, quickly got it to the boat, photographed, tagged it and released it. Two hours later we caught, tagged and released our second blue – not bad for half-a-day of fishing. We succeeded because Simmons knew the location of the blue water and the marlin since he had fished this area almost every day for the two weeks before we arrived. Current knowledge of fishing and water conditions and the locations where anglers have spotted and taken marlin recently gives a tremendous advantage in moving from a good marlin fisherman to a great marlin fisherman.

Know What Marlin Eat

How do you know on any given day what type of bait a marlin prefers? You don’t. More importantly, don’t even try to guess. Eric Gill, a great Gulf Coast marlin fisherman once told me, “I mainly use ballyhoo for the bait on my outriggers. I also run blue and white Soft Heads, as well as Black Barts when I’m fishing the Upper Gulf. I also keep some dead baits such as mullet and mackerel on hand if the marlin won’t eat the ballyhoo or lures.”

Gill keeps his baits cool and fresh in an Igloo cooler, and he doesn’t rig them while the boat’s on the way out to blue water. “I usually rig my baits the day before. Sometimes I’ll even use baits I’ve rigged a week before and salted and wrapped in a garbage bag and stored in my freezer. The salt keeps the baits tough so they’ll last longer. On the morning of the trip, I put ice in my cooler and then lay the bait on top of the ice. I don’t sit the baits in the ice, because I don’t want them to get wet. If we’re putting out six lines, I’ll run two ballyhoo on the outriggers and blue-andwhite soft lures inside the outriggers. I constantly change the ballyhoos out and put new ones on about every two hours to make sure the baits are fresh and appealing.”

Form a Great Fishing Team

For the best chance to find, hook, wire and tag a marlin, put together the best team you can. Each member must understand his or her role on the team, and each must work well with the others. Although the captain is important, I consider the first mate as my first choice for a team member, since his responsibilities will include:

• Rigging the bait.

• Setting up the baits in the correct order and in the right place in the wake.

• Changing the baits as the dead baits get that washed-out look.

• Watching for marlin approaching a bait, billing the bait or attacking it.

• Setting the hook.

• Getting the angler in the fighting chair and in a position to fight the fish.

• Barking out instructions to the captain regarding the direction the fish is running and which way he needs to turn the boat to put the angler in the best position to keep pressure on the fish so there’s no slack in the line.

• Wiring the marlin, tagging, and releasing the fish.

I compare the first mate to a combination of coach and the quarterback on a football team. If he’s really experienced he can play both roles effectively. The boat captain, like the owner of a football team, makes sure the first mate does his job, gets the team to and from the marlin grounds, and often plays the role of the coach by maneuvering the boat and the team to win by landing the fish. The anglers, as few as two to or as many as six, must understand the battle involved in subduing a big blue marlin. An angler may have to sit in that chair for an hour or more, and have a certain amount of grace under pressure. No one likes an angler who gets upset with everyone and/or himself, screams at the first mate and the captain, or doesn’t concentrate on his job of working the fish to boatside. Generally, a great marlin team has had years of experience of fishing together.

My dream team would include:

• A computer geek fisher man who’s obsessed with marlin fishing and enjoys spending hours researching top destinations, the tournaments, top captains and scientific data. He’ll e-mail marine biologists who have studied a particular area and know what bait the marlin prefer at different times of year in that location, where and how anglers have caught marlin, and the tides, moon phases and all the other factors that influence marlin concentrations and behavior.

• A skilled angler who’s an avid photographer and videographer, who loves to fish with a team and can video the fight, the tag and release.

• A great marlin fisherman and chef. Let’s face it - there’s no better food than a delicious meal someone prepares on a fishing trip.

• A rabid marlin fisherman who’s also a cheerleader who keeps everybody’s spirits up. He always has a new joke and when the marlin gets off, the line snaps, or someone loses a fish he’ll say, “Hey guys, wait a minute. We’ve had a strike, a hook-up and part of a good fight. If we’ve found one marlin, there’s another one out here. Let’s forget this one and go after the next one!”

You may have a different list of characters and crew that will make up your dream team. However, I want these kinds of people around me for a serious marlin trip.

Moving from good to great doesn’t just happen. After each trip, smart marlin fishermen analyze what they’ve done right and what they’ve done wrong after each trip. Then the next time they go, they’ll have much greater odds of moving from good to great.