Article by Dale Timmons
Anglers and crews who fish in big money billfish tournaments like the recent White Marlin Open or this week’s Mid-Atlantic $500,000 often have to rely on quick measurements before deciding whether or not to boat a white marlin. Unfortunately, those measurements, even if accurate, are not always a reliable indicator of weight. To paraphrase an old axiom, it all depends on how a fish carries its weight, or in other words, “it has to be fat all the way back to its tail.” An example of this struck home for me at the Open. We weighed two white marlin back to back (actually one was a roundscale spearfish), and they had exactly the same fork length, total length and girth measurements. The only difference was that one weighed 74 pounds, while the other tipped the scales at 67 pounds, a 7-pound difference. On a 70-pound marlin, that’s a full 10 per cent! All I can say again is, look for the one with “a big head and a fat rear end”…
Speaking of marlin tails, Andy “El Cheapo” Szypula is known as the White Marlin Open’s number one fan. He has spent a lot of years helping out at the scales, and during that time he has collected several marlin bills and tails, along with a few sets of shark jaws. He dries the artifacts out and uses them to entertain and inform the youngsters in the crowd during slow periods at the scales. This year he had a blue marlin tail that has been stripped down to the bare essentials, and even I was amazed at the construction of the engine that drives this powerful fish. Each side of the tail consists of at least 20 “bones” (though I’m not sure what material they actually are) that are bundled together by connective tissue. Each one is tapered from about three eighths to half an inch where they connect to a center “bone” out to a point that is actually “feathered”. All of the bones are held together by tissue, which was gone in Andy’s tail (he had held the original structure together with duct tape, since he said he could never get it back together if it had come apart). Another example of the amazing designs nature has evolved. The “bundle” structure of the tail no doubt gives it more flexibility, and probably even strength, than a single bone would have. Incidentally, he also had a stripped down blue marlin dorsal fin, and each one of the “rays” that stick up and fold down in the fin are connected by a separate joint that allows them to move independently…
Speaking of marlin, I received an e-mail last week from an organization called “Keep America Fishing”. It urged support for a House bill (H.R. 5804), introduced in July by Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), which will prohibit the commercial harvest, sale and importation of billfish throughout the United States. It has been illegal to sell marlin caught in the Atlantic Ocean for years, but a loophole in that law allows the sale and importation of billfish caught in the Pacific, as long as the proper paper trail documents where the fish came from. The e-mail says that “according to a study commissioned by the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), the U.S. is the world’s largest importer of billfish, buying about 3 million pounds of marlin in 2006 – or between 10,000 and 15,000 fish a year – for sale in restaurants and grocery stores.” H.R. 5804, known as the Billfish Conservation Act, would close U.S. commercial markets to billfish, no matter where they were caught…
It’s that time of year when we often see strange or unusual fish, sometimes tropical species, as the water is at its warmest. Last week I saw a new one, and I still haven’t been able to identify it. Maybe someone out there reading this can shed some light. Capt. Ed “Greenie” Greene of the Ocean City Fishing Center had thrown his cast net over a school of small bunker that he planned to use for chum on a cobia trip. I was watching him pack them for the freezer when I realized there were several other fish mixed in with the bunker. They were about four to six inches long, and they looked very much like small bluefish, except that they sported a bright yellow stripe down their sides, right along the lateral line. I have seen plenty of juvenile bluefish, and I’m confident these fish were something different. They did have the beginnings of pretty sharp teeth, but the eye was relatively large, larger than on a bluefish. I went to a couple of my books that usually are very helpful, but came up empty. I showed one of the fish to Capt. Mark Sampson, and he had never seen one either. A little help, maybe…?
It has been a very productive year for cobia. It started with the spring migration, when anglers sight casting off Cape Hatteras were catching as many as 40 to 50 fish per day, then moved up to the Chesapeake Bay-Bridge Tunnel, where there was an excellent bite for bottom fishermen in the early summer, and last week sight casters were claiming as many as 15 fish a day. In the past couple of weeks, the bounty has moved up to Maryland and Delaware, where better than normal catches of “ling” (as they are known in some areas) are coming from areas like Great Gull Shoal and Fenwick Shoal. Most of the local cobia catches have come on boats that were anchored or drifting while chumming and fishing with either cut baits or live baits such as spot, eels or small bluefish. Cobia can also be caught by looking for them near the surface around buoys or even along tide lines. When most people first see a cobia, they often think it’s a shark. In this case, you can throw a live eel, spot or bluefish to the fish, but some anglers, especially down south, prefer to use a brightly colored bucktail jig (chartreuse, yellow or orange) tipped with a large plastic twister or a Gulp! artificial bait. The biggest problem with sight casting is that cobia you can see will very often refuse a bait, which can be frustrating, to say the least. If you are using live bait, don’t throw the bait right in the cobia’s face, but a little ahead of and beyond the fish. The same works for lures—cast ahead of and beyond the fish, then bring the lure rapidly on a path that crosses that of the cobia. Hopefully the fish will react to the lure and hit before it realizes what it is. Even if you are bottom fishing with live or cut bait, it is a good idea to keep a rod rigged with an artificial in case you see a fish come up to the surface near the boat. Cobia are attracted to anything floating on the water, including boats, so don’t be surprised if you see one suddenly appear. They will also hide under stingrays swimming near the surface, so if you see a school of rays, be sure to check them out. Lastly, if you are lucky enough to get a “cobe” in the boat, be careful, since they are known to go crazy in a cockpit. A gentleman several years ago sent me a graphic photo of a large hook buried in his leg. It was put there by a cobia that was definitely not happy…
Contact Dale Timmons at [email protected] or call
410-629-1191.
