The old joke "You can't get there from here" rings true for many of the remote billfish destinations that hard-core anglers choose to seek out and fish. But that doesn't mean you can't go - you just have to go somewhere else first! Most trips that fall into the exotic category take a little bit of additional planning and a few extra stops, but I can promise you the trip will be worth your while. Even if your wife refuses to fish, she will thank you for taking her to such a wonderful, exotic and out-of-the-way place.
Madeira
To get to Madeira you have to go through Europe, so pick a city you would like to overnight in and spend a night out on the town before heading on to your final destination. It's a good idea to be well rested before your arrival at Madeira International Airport - the airstrip is barely longer than the deck of an aircraft carrier!
The Portuguese island of Madeira is a very special place for tourists. The spotlessly clean city of Funchal has cobblestone streets and dozens of shops that sell everything from the famous Madeira fortified wine to leather and wooden furniture; it's a shopper's and bargain hunter's paradise.
There are hotels for every budget. At Reed's Hotel, where Winston Churchill came to paint, gentlemen still must wear a jacket and tie to dine in the evenings. You could eat out for months at a different excellent restaurant every night. Both the seafood and meat here are superb.
Hiking around the island is breathtaking. Aqueducts called lavadas carry water for irrigation from one rugged mountain valley, with a stream running year-round, around rock-spined ridges to the next dry valley. There are more than 1,300 miles of watercourses with 25 miles of short tunnels sprinkled in.
A concrete footpath containing a small stream fastened to the side of a precipitous cliff offers easy walking in unbelievably rugged and scenic rural areas of the island. Walks can be less than an hour or take up to entire days, with several small tunnels offering shortcuts for both the water and hikers. Many of the treks allow hikers to pick and eat fruit from fortuitously placed trees along the way.
Getting Stewart Campbell actually to take time off from fishing to slide down a cobblestone mountain road in a wooden sled was one of the highlights of my several visits to Madeira. We only started fishing a couple of hours later than usual, but the interlude had already made our day.
In the old days, horse-drawn wagons would take a towering load of sleds up the winding mountain road that used to transport fresh produce back down to town at the bottom of the hill. Today, a taxi ride uphill gets you to the waiting sled men dressed in white. A wicker basket holds two tourists, while the sled man controls the wooden runners down the small, winding streets and alleys. It's quite a wild ride.
You always have a good time onshore in Madeira, but it's the expectation of catching big blues that draws anglers to this idyllic spot. I caught my first grander blue in Madeira, and I'll never forget it.
We'd seen and made a pass on a school of giant bluefin tuna and didn't get a bite. As I turned to try to find them again, a nice fish piled on a lure on the short outrigger and immediately jumped right at the boat.
My deckhand instantly yelled, "It's a grander!" But it didn't look big enough to me. "Calm down," I called down from the bridge. "It's a nice one but not a grand - looks like about 800."
A half-hour later we had the fish on the leader. Looking down from the flybridge as my mate wired the fish up and stuck a tag in it, I got a good look at the fish's thick back. It stayed fat all the way to the tail.
"You were right, Scottie. It'll go!" I said. Secretly, I was thinking it could maybe top 1,100 but didn't want to say so in case it wasn't quite that big.
The fish surged away when the tag went in and sounded before we could get a good-enough shot at its shoulder to place a pop-up satellite tag (PSAT) in place. As we tried to get the fish back up, I got a radio call and notified the fleet that we had put a tag in a grander and were now trying to get a PSAT in the fish.
Unfortunately, the fish eventually came up tail-wrapped and dead as a doornail. It looked much smaller than I had previously thought, probably only in the high 700s. I thought to myself, this is going to be embarrassing. I just called a 700-pounder a grander on the radio! We had to get this fish going again so we could release it.
We tried for a long time, without success, to revive the fish but to no avail. However, I could not in good conscience cut the fish loose when I knew that a local orphanage would gladly take the big fish to feed the kids.
As we struggled to get the fish into Duyfken, the head started looking bigger. With the fish halfway in, I started to think that it was close to a grand, not so far off as to be really embarrassing. When I put the tape measure on it, we knew it was touch and go - maybe 1,000 pounds, maybe not.
It weighed 1,004 pounds on the scales and reaffirmed my long-held opinion that even after catching several-dozen marlin exceeding 1,000 pounds, nobody can really guess the weight of live marlin with consistency.
