On the last day of my last trip to Bom Bom, I woke up stiff and sore from too much contact with small boats and big Atlantic blue marlin. Larry Dahlberg and I had gone three-for-six with some 700-pound fish and I figured I would spend the last day exploring the island with my wife and then go snapper fishing with the boys in the evening.
I have always been a big fan of shallow-water snapper fishing, especially when you can catch big American reds on light tackle in less than 10 feet of water. I accomplished this in fine fashion, catching three nice fish between 6 and 10 pounds. That made for a good evening, until I found out that during the day Dahlberg had released a 1,000-plus-pound fish and broken a rod on another grander.
Jealous?
Hell, yes, I was jealous. But I also recognized this was an important day for Capt. Hennie Marais and fellow captains Alan Myburg and Argentino, who have tirelessly worked over the last year with limited resources to explore the vast potential of this West African island nation's waters as a blue marlin producer. Dahlberg's grander, coupled with the number of 600- to 700-pound fish we had caught earlier in the week, certainly justified their efforts.
An Idea Is Born
I first went to Bom Bom in September of 1994 to check into its reputation as a world-record spot for Atlantic sailfish. Capt. Lance Glaser and Goldie Goldon of Goldon Fishing Expeditions had just picked up the resort as a client, and they put together a trip for myself and Dahlberg's television show, The Hunt for Big Fish. We were all blown away by the resort and the fantastic sailfishing (which proved every bit as spectacular as reported), but I never got over a photograph that hangs in the island's magnificent teak and mahogany bar.
The photo is classic, straight out of a Hemingway novel, but with a happy ending - a grinning native fisherman and his dugout canoe on the shore with a big blue marlin, suitably free of shark bites. It is perfect for Bom Bom, an end-of-the-world fantasy in its own right, to have this photo. It gives you living proof that Santiago brought his fish ashore in one piece after all, and that, while being defeated in an impossible battle is worthy of a Nobel Prize, nothing puts a smile on your face like victory. It also told me that there were some big blue marlin around Bom Bom and that somebody should be fishing for them with something besides a canoe and a hand line.
We had many a long talk about marlin during that trip, with the upshot being a return trip to Bom Bom in August of 1995. We picked August as a best guess as to what would be the peak time of the blue marlin migration through the area. Subsequent events were to prove that while we may not have hit the nail on the head, we were pretty close to the mark.
A Little Background
If you missed my article "Bom Bom," May 1995, and Dahlberg's television shows on the island, some background information is in order. Bom Bom is a small island located on the northern tip of Principi, one of the two islands comprising the Democratic Republic of Sao Tomi and Principi. These islands lie in the Atlantic Ocean some 150 miles offshore of Gabon. If you look for them on a world map, you'll find them partially obscured by the equator, something you should remember when you're buying sunscreen for your trip. In any case, the place is isolated out in the Gulf of Guinea and, as resort manager Ursula Marais says, "It's not really Africa; it's an island in the middle of a very big ocean."
Whatever or wherever it is, Bom Bom is nothing short of amazing. You arrive via a clay road through triple canopy jungle to the edge of the ocean and the resort, which is expertly carved into the environment. The gardens are finely sculpted and the circular bungalows afford guests great comfort without detracting from the scenery. A walk across a narrow 300-meter bridge brings you to the restaurant and bar, as well as the boat dock. As you stand on the bridge and watch the ocean roll by, you are truly at the end of the world.
This out-of-the-way location makes the luxury of Bom Bom seem all the more impossible when you consider the logistics of bringing in Philippine mahogany for the structures, and all of the little things - like food, water and engine parts - necessary to run a world-class resort. This is where Marais and a superb staff earn their keep, coordinating deliveries and finagling their way through any shortfalls. The fact that Bom Bom's owner, Chris Hellinger, owns a shipping company doesn't hurt matters either.
Research and Development
Following the end of the 1994 winter sailfish season, Marais and Co. set out to get a handle on the blue marlin population in earnest. Charter parties were made up of visiting oil company people from Gabon and Europe, but the staff often fished without guests as they expanded their efforts away from sailfishing. With usually two and sometimes three boats out pulling lures, Bom Bom's crews began catching blues in April, and by May were averaging five shots per day per boat. Double and even triple headers of fish in the 400- to 600-pound range were not rare, and by the time we arrived in August, there was plenty of excitement, as the fishing was improving and some very large fish had been lost, including an estimated grander the day before we began fishing.
Marais and Myburg had come a long way in a year's time, and not without jumping some formidable hurdles. "When we started, we did not know much about blue marlin fishing tactics," Marais says. "We had to get up to speed on what worked, and we did this by reading U.S. magazines and applying that here. Some of it worked and some of it did not. Like all fishermen, we continue to experiment, make slight changes here and there, but when we settled on a basic strategy, we could then explore Principi and not just fish around Bom Bom."
What Marais and Myburg found was that two locations within 6 miles of Bom Bom were the top blue marlin producers, locations in 1,000 meters of water known as the Sundy Deep and Razza. Razza is almost directly north of the resort and Sundy Deep is northwest of the island. Both have produced big fish, but there seems to be no particular pattern to the fishing.
"We have not found reasons for movement," Myburg says. "Sometimes the fish will be at Razza and sometimes at Sundy. The only way to know is to go fish both locations. We have found that the moon has a considerable influence, and we go from four or five blue marlin bites a day to seven or eight bites when the moon is in waning. We also know that early in the morning is not a good time to fish, which is something that is true of our sailfishing."
Big Blue Marlin
Our trip started out slowly, and then, as predicted by Myburg, fishing heated up as the moon began to cooperate. Our first two days we averaged three bites per boat, with three boats fishing. Two of the fish were small, say, 250 pounds, but all the others were nice fish with a rough guess average being 550 pounds. As the moon improved, so did bites (between five to seven per day) and fish size, with another rough-guess average of 650 pounds. Much like a bell curve from high school, these figures exclude the two granders.
We fished some days in fairly sloppy conditions but had nice weather during the latter part of the week. Given the fact that the boats are all 28- to 32-foot Bertrams and Blackfins, the reader will realize that we were not in St. Thomas-like conditions, although the fishing was similar, except for the lack of sharks. While we are on the comparison subject, I would have to say that Bom Bom is every bit on the same stature with St. Thomas and Mauritius, and with enough exploration could prove to be in the same league as Madeira.
I do know that we did not scratch the surface when I was there and that a considerable amount of time will have to be spent before the vast possibilities of Bom Bom can be tapped. "There is so much out there and all we have right now are three boats with no color recorders or GPS," Marais says. (The lodge had ordered two additional 32-foot Blackfins with full electronics.) "It is really quite possible that we are not even fishing the best locations. Also, there are huge shoals of squid that are caught in the summer at Sao Tomi. I know they pass through here as well, but we have not yet been able to find them. If we could find them and fish them, who knows what that would bring?"
I don't know about you, but I would like to be there to find out.
