Article by Capt. Franky Pettolina
I was talking with my mate Mr. Evans while we were getting rigged up for the White Marlin Open. He was rigging ballyhoo on O-rings and copper wire while I was twisting up mullets for a dredge teaser. We both have been fishing the White Marlin Open for over 30 years now and we were discussing how much bait rigging has changed over time.
Our boat cooler for the week consisted of several dozen small “dink” ballyhoo. Some were rigged to skip behind Squidnation Slammer chugger heads and others were rigged with a 3/8 ounce egg sinker to swim. We also had a teaser bait cooler that held “horse” ballyhoo behind assorted Island Lures to put behind our Squidnation squid chain teasers (I love the new shade of blue squids - and so did a white marlin on the first day!) and also forty or so chin-weighted mullets for our left dredge teaser. A fair quantity of baits, but not much in the way of variety. Our best spread for white marlin fishing has become very simplistic.
The first White Marlin Open I fished in as a mate was in 1986. My memory might not be one hundred percent accurate on the quantities, but I know it was jam packed with rigged squid, flying fish, mullets with hooks, double hooked eels, bonita belly strips, Spanish mackerel and of course, assorted sized ballyhoo. All were rigged on steel leaders that were between 18 and 25 feet long. Looking back, I am not sure how it wasn’t a big tangled mess! Unlike the bait pattern behind the “Last Call” these days, the trolling spread was pretty complicated in the 80s. The left flat line was usually a mullet. The right flat was either a mullet or a squid. The right short rigger held a Spanish mackerel and the left was either a flying fish or a ballyhoo. The long riggers were strip baits or ballyhoo and the center rigger shotgun bait was the double hooked eel (whitey looked awful silly with one of those slimy suckers wrapped around his snoot!). For teasers we usually had a chain of “natural” colored rubber squid on the left side and a tandem of Mumford lures on the right (black and purple on the back and green and yellow in the front). Dredges were not yet in use (although they were being developed by some super secretive guys).
So what led to the big change? In my case it was a gradual evolution. The first key factor was better quality and diameter monofilament for leader material. Jinkai brand was one of the first that had a soft, yet durable mono that was suitable for natural baits. Stiff, thick, heavy mono was fine for lures but we needed something a little more forgiving for our baits. Jinkai was just the ticket. By 1990 my natural baits were almost exclusively on monofilament leaders.
The next big change was the size of the hooks and the baits. By the mid 90s things had downscaled tremendously. This was due in large part to traveling fisherman bringing back techniques from exotic locales like Isla Mujeres and Venezuela. Guys were putting up good numbers of billfish in these places using smaller, short shanked hooks on small to medium ballyhoo. My trolling spread in Isla Mujeres in 1997 was exclusively small swimming ballyhoo on 6/0 9175 Mustad J- hooks. Those hooks were roughly the same size, or maybe even slightly smaller than what I used for flounder in the 80s!!! And of course the dredge teaser had come into play by then so we were experimenting with different ways to attach massive amounts of mullets to umbrella rigs and spreader bars.
The ease of rigging ballyhoo on short shanked hooks and the success we were having slowly made sewing eels and squid a thing of the past for all but a few crews. Spanish mackerel were still a “go to” big bait but the bait coolers had mostly ballyhoo in them. Steel leaders were all but forgotten for marlin fishing.
In the early 2000s the biggest change occurred. Circle hooks. Legendary globe trotting Captain Ron Hamlin began promoting the use of circle hooks for billfish trolling in the late 90s, but it didn’t take hold until the new millennium. Many of us were slow to change, but the federal government helped to make up our minds for us. A study was done on billfish mortality rate using J-hooks versus circle hooks. Twenty white marlin were released with satellite tags. Ten on circle hooks and ten on Js. I think the sample size and the release techniques were both ridiculous, but that is yet another conversation for another time. The fish released on circle hooks did significantly better than those on Js and the NMFS/NOAA higher ups proposed a law requiring circle hooks in any tournament that had a prize for white marlin. We had to learn to fish circles then! I now embrace the circle hook system and use it any time I am marlin fishing. Everybody should.
I guess the question you might ask is whether we do better now than we did then. There is more competition on the water now, but the fish stocks seem very healthy. My favorite rigs from the 80s wouldn’t see the light of day behind the “Last Call” in 2018, but we caught fish then and we catch fish now. I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Evans and I will go retro one day before the end of the season and I will post the results! I wonder if any tackle shops have eels or flying fish in stock?
Capt Franky Pettolina is Co-Captain of the charter boat, “Last Call”, owner of Pettolina Marine Surveying, Inc. and multi-term President of the Ocean City Marlin Club. To book a trip on the “Last Call”, call 443-783-3699.
