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Every time you venture offshore, you're riding on the best teaser you could ever use. Experienced crews that use both their electronics and polar-ized sunglasses to spot fish, and especially those that do so from the tower, can all tell stories of what the guys in Cairns, Australia, call prop watchers. The first person I ever heard use the phrase was the legendary Capt. George Bransford. At first I thought he was just exaggerating about how many fish were attracted to his boat, but I soon found out that he definitely was not kidding.
Bransford liked to troll big, dead, natural baits very slowly. At that time, we didn't have the equipment and hadn't yet learned how to keep really big baits in our wooden outrigger clips at much more than 4 knots. I soon lost track of how many fish Bransford first spotted cruising right behind the transom. They were way inside the nearest bait.
Bransford fished from the flying bridge; Sea Baby II didn't even have a tower. I wonder how many more fish the man nicknamed "The Fox" could have spotted if we had a tower in those days. I know that I enjoyed a huge advantage a few years later when I ran Kingfish - the first boat with a tower in Cairns.
An observant skipper sometimes sees a marlin following so closely behind the transom that there's a real fear the fish's bill is going to hit the props, especially when pulling big baits at slow trolling speeds. But I haven't heard of that actually happening - yet.
When a fish is first seen very close to the boat, we often have to hand-line or wind up a bait to get any reaction from the marlin, whose attention was fixated on the boat. If the marlin whirls around and bites immediately upon seeing the bait, you can be pretty certain that the fish hadn't seen the bait before it was pulled up into visual range. I see a similar reaction many times each year when baiting marlin we found tailing, sometimes hundreds of yards away.
Even when fishing high-speed lures, I occasionally spot a marlin underneath the corner of the boat. Although the white water generated by the higher trolling speeds used when pulling artificial lures hinders my ability to look down into the water, underneath that thin surface layer, the fish's vision is unhindered, and many fish come to the boat before they ever become aware of a bait or lure.
Many of the "crash" strikes that occur on flat lines surprise the anglers in the cockpit or the skippers who stay on the flybridge. However, a captain or spotter in the tower often sees these fish tracking the bait, or the boat, before they decide to eat.
During our annual Marlin University in Costa Rica, I like to go up in the tower and watch the baits and teasers. I have seen dozens of sailfish materialize behind a dredge long before anyone lower down has a clue the fish is there. These fish have to see the boat, or even more likely, the boat's wake before seeing any baits, lures or teasers.
that position, and you'll end up catching more big fish and lose fewer expensive teasers. Plus, you'll also get to snicker at the fellow whose best big fish story is about the one that ate his teaser and went away!
What Raised Him - Boat or Lure?
I often get asked why some boats catch more fish or raise fish better than others. The most common answer is usually because one of the captains possesses a bit more skill. And you can find reams of scientific studies that prove this to be true - even over a multitude of different fisheries. (See "Skippers, spotters and seiners: Analysis of the 'skipper effect' in U.S. menhaden purse-seine fisheries" by Ruttan and Tyedmers, available online at www.sciencedirect.com.)
But what about the same captain on the same boat who suddenly gets red-hot or goes stone-cold dead after being king of the hill? What happened? The most likely answer is absolutely nothing happened. It is the so-called law of averages catching up over time. The laws of probability are not just good ideas; they are laws, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of data to make any real conclusions.
