Making ajustments

A few days ago Tom Shellenberger arrived with three of his fishing buddies from Moab UT to do a little marlin fishing. The bite had been slow but they had 3 days so I was confident we could scratch out a couple of fish each day. The main concentration of marlin had been off of La Ribera but it had been a lot of show and not much go.

First day there was a local tournanemt scheduled so we knew the spot known to have some fish would have a lot of traffic. With that, we headed off shore with the hopes of finding tuna, dorado or marlin away from the fleet. The day was slow and the score ended up with one sailfish.

Day two was spent off La Ribera where 25 tournament boats only landed 3 marlin the day before. It was reported that fish had been sighted jumping and feeding. Knowing there would be less traffic our decision was made to check it out. We saw marlin jumping and tailing all day and had several fish in our pattern. We tried to get them to go on Ballyhoo, green jacks and sardines. At the end of the day we were zero for 6 good shots. It was a very beautiful day on the water but not what any of us had hoped for.

The following morning I knew we needed to make some ajustments. Getting an early start we ran in shore of the location we had fished the day before. I had seen bait there a couple of days earlier and we found a school of small skipjack foaming on the surface. We were able to catch and fill our tuna tubes with this great bait in short order and were in business.

We started slow trolling the skipjack and also put one deep with our down rigger. The area looked dead and I was starting to wonder if we had made a mistake when bam! The down rigger bait got bit. It was a marlin and when it surfaced it brought a whole school of marlin with it. Wham! We hooked a second fish and had a double going. Another boat near us trolled by and hung one.