The Assegai crew had a solid lock on the big-fish prize - or so everyone thought. Capt. Luke Fallon and his angler Hugh Wiley weighed in an 1,170-pound black early in the 2001 Lizard Island Black Marlin Tournament, and no fish had been weighed in during the last two competitions.
However, nothing is certain in any kind of fishing, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed once again why it is considered the premier spot for marlin over 1,000 pounds. The run of huge marlin that started before the tournament with a 1,260-pounder caught on board Sea Baby IV with angler Norm Ennis and Capt. Ross Finlayson continued. Later in the week angler Adam Atkins, fishing with Capt. Tim Dean on board Calypso, weighed in an even larger marlin of 1,278 pounds that eventually won the big-fish award. Capt. Darren Biggles Hayden on board Allure also broke the magic mark with a 1,058-pound fish, angler Parke Berolzheimer's first grander. No one had ever heard of three granders being weighed in during a single tournament anyplace in the world - and this was only the tip of the iceberg. Tag cards recording numerous 800-plus-pound fish also came pouring in.
On board Top Shot, the 43-foot O'Brien I had leased for the season, we were feeling a bit left out. We had trailed the leaders on board Capt. Bill Bilson's Viking II from Day One when they jumped to a three-tag lead, and we never tagged a single fish.
Fish are almost never spread evenly through the available water, and we found that we had started the Lizard Island competition badly out of position. A quick dash 70 miles north from our position at Linden Bank put us back into the thick of things at No. 5 Ribbon Reef (100 miles north of the main base at Cairns and 30 miles offshore of Cooktown) for the fishing from Day Two onward.
Fishing was good, but the catching was slow, and our faith in circle hooks took a beating (see ''Circle Tactics,'' page 53). We were getting plenty of shots on 150- to 400-pound blacks but pulling way too many hooks, and we couldn't find anything over 600 pounds. We managed to hold our own on numbers of tags after Day One but still couldn't gain ground in the numbers race or find the big one.
Finally, on Day Five, two quick 800-plus-pound tag-and-releases by angler Fernando Aguilar raised our spirits. Both fish, hooked squarely in the jaw, gave us classic fights with lots of jumps that sapped their mighty strength and allowed the heavy drags to bring them alongside for the tag. We felt even better when our friendly competitors on board Viking II got some great video of our second fish from a position closer to the jumping fish than we were. They even told us we might have been a little too conservative in our weight estimations.
Thanks to the Tuna Boats
As good as it was in 2001, the season would not have been a particularly good one if all the action we recorded was near the reef and the edge of the continental shelf. Years ago, long periods of calm seas inevitably reduced our ability to find fish and get strikes. Wandering out into thousands of fathoms, far from the drop-off, was a hit-or-miss proposition with many misses and only an occasional home run. ''Like looking for a needle in a haystack. Only first you have to find the haystack!'' as top skipper Laurie Wright put it.
This year we got a lot of help from a small fleet of domestic Aussie tuna boats that employ longlines, hand lines and (less often) trolling gear, targeting yellowfin and bigeye tuna. They try to avoid marlin and are required by law to release all billfish except swordfish. They do have an element of marlin bycatch, but their overall effect is far less than when the high-seas fleets of Japanese longliners fished these waters and before they were banned within Australian Economic Zone waters.
In mid-October one of the tuna captains called a couple of the marlin boats and said, ''You really ought to be here and get some of these things out of our way.'' Fishing was slow along the edge, and a majority of the fleet responded. That call resulted in what became the first really hot action of the year. At least a dozen game boats trolled or ran to GPS numbers that Michael Kenney on the Balance had given us, and the bite was on.
Some 20 to 30 miles east of the anchorage at Opal Reef, several tuna boats were working dense schools of high-priced bigeye tuna that filled our fathometer screens. A few larger V-shaped single marks lurked around the edges of the tuna schools and scattered throughout the area - marlin.
The first day we ran offshore, I did not hear of a single marlin boat having less than four strikes. The biggest complaint was of marlin being lost - from pulled hooks, broken lines, shark attacks, and in at least one instance, attacks by pilot whales! Capt. Laurie Wright and his crew on Iona had a pod of pilot whales attack a grander-sized marlin and nibble away the dorsal and anal fin spines on the back half of the fish, removing fins, skin and a small amount of flesh.
I saw photos of the remains (975 pounds), and agreed with Wright that it probably would not quite have made 1,000 pounds, even without the multiple injuries. (It would have been released in any case.) It looked as if the whales were playing some strange game or maybe skinning or cleaning the big marlin prior to actually eating its flesh.
Several times throughout the season, usually during a spell of calm water, we responded to information from the pros, as Aussies call commercial fishermen. Almost every trip was worth the extra run offshore. It made a major addition to the season.
Big Fish Abound
When the high-pressure cells that create the southeast trade wind finally moved from west to east along the southern coast of the continent, fishing on the edge erupted. A firm ridge of high pressure made the Lizard Island tournament a huge success by pushing at least two large groups of fish onto the edge. Fishing turned on along the Great Barrier Reef from No. 4 Ribbon north and west to Hicks Reef. The two boats with the most releases, Viking II and Rebel, were based at those two extremes.
On one mid-November trip to a deep plateau well off the edge, but still inside the tuna fleet, we watched angler Jack Owen fight a big fish on Kanahooee with Capt. Brian Felton. The huge fish jumped on the leader and double line, and even from 200 yards away I could see it was massive. I told my crew it was easily a grander and called Felton on the VHF radio to tell him my appraisal and get his best guess.
''He's way up there, and this guy has never boated one, so we are going to try to get him,'' Felton replied. The fish weighed 1,256 pounds and fulfilled Owen's longtime dream.
That made three fish over 1,200 pounds for the season, and the biggest was still to come - angler Jason Caughlan fishing aboard Manu Kai with Capt. Craig ''Sparrow'' Denham boated a monster of 1,389 pounds. Caught off No. 6 Ribbon Reef and weighed in both on a mothership and at the pier in Cooktown, the fish ranks as the largest in over 20 years, and is believed to be the fourth largest ever weighed in Cairns. Hooked deeply on a big bait and J-hook, the fish came to gaff in under 10 minutes.
Perhaps the high point of the season for us on Top Shot came on our last heavy-tackle fishing day, November 29. We had a satellite pop-up tag on board, funded by special contributions to the Game Fishing Association of Australia's Research and Development Foundation and supplied by John Gunn, Australia's internationally renowned tuna and marlin tagging guru. If we could not catch a suitable candidate ourselves, we would try to place the $7,500 high-tech device in someone else's fish.
To transfer the tag, we had a tennis ball with a short piece of heavy leader with a loop on one end and a heavy-duty snap swivel on the other. We could snap one of our heavy rods to the loop and throw the ball to a boat with a fish on. I would have to maneuver around the boat, fighting the fish until they could snap our swivel to their leader and either unsnap their swivel or cut the line. We could then fight the fish up to our boat and apply the special tag with its oversized attaching anchor before cutting the leader or removing the hook. The tag pulls much harder than a normal spaghetti tag, and the large titanium barb must be inserted through the spines of the dorsal fin to prevent the tag from falling off before its programmed release time, which can be up to six months.
We pulled the hook on an estimated 800-pound black, then a short time later ran over to Capt. Brad Craft's Sea Strike. Craft had called to report that he was fighting an estimated 500-pounder that appeared to be hooked in the jaw with no signs of blood or any injury that would damage the fish.
Both boats pirouetted and spun, backed up and ran ahead as Craft tried to get what was certainly much more than a 500-pound marlin up to his boat. The fish fought strongly for another hour and still showed no signs of giving up when we decided to call it quits. Linden Bank is a bad place for shark attacks on hooked marlin, and I feared that even if we could get the tag in place before the sharks moved in, the tired marlin might end up easy prey after release. Soon after we left, Craft started marking other big shapes on his fathometer and had his angler deliberately break the line rather than lose the valiant marlin to marauding sharks.
Just before we had to pick up the lines, we hooked, fought, tagged and released a healthy, active 500-pound black marlin. Having hooked the fish on a 20/0 Mustad circle hook that wound up in the jaw, we would now wait impatiently for a long three months to see if Gunn could download the scientifically important information the little tag was recording.
When it was all said and done, 2001 doesn't necessarily rank as Cairns best season ever, despite the incredible run of giant fish that started early and continued as I packed my bags for home. Certainly this area has posted multiple granders many times over the past few decades. What made this season so noteworthy was that it represented something of a return to the Cairns fishery we know so well, one that continues to produce more giant marlin than any other location in the world.
