Jason's catch of the day

After our first quick catches, we went through quite a while where we weren't catching anything at all. We could tell that Darren was getting kind of frustrated since he was calling some of the other boats to see if they were catching anything and they were all saying "sure, we caught two sailfish already." We finally caught up to a school of fish we'd been tracking for some time and took a couple of passes through it, but didn't catch anything. Finally, we hooked something. When Jason reeled it in, we were kind of psyched - it was a Bonito tuna - about 10 pounds. But to Darren, this was a baitfish! He put the Bonito into a "tuna tube" which keeps water flowing over the fish to keep it alive, and we took another pass through to see if we could get another Bonito. Sure enough, we get another one right away. At this point, we freshened the teasers with the stomachs of the Mahi Mahi (Javier had filleted them while we were trolling), and set hooks into the Bonitos so they became live lures (at this point, I was feeling kind of sorry for the Bonitos, and Jason was making horrible jokes about one Bonito talking to the other - "well, Fred, this doesn't look so good. . ."). We set out everything and started trolling around in circles near the school of bait, looking to get a Marlin. Apparently Marlin are pretty aggressive and will come up to assess weird acting tuna (our poor Bonitos).

This actually went on for quite a while (promting me to ask just how long you could troll with live Bonito before they become dead Bonito bait). Darren had just said "we'll give this another minute and then we'll pick up and move somewhere else," when WHAM, both bonito reels start whizzing out to sea incredibly quickly. They handed one reel to Jason and Javier took the other, and we moved them around to the front of the boat so that they'd have more leverage. As we did that, we saw the fish jump clear out of the water several hundred yards out - a blue marlin!

Darren strapped Jason into the back brace, effectively clipping Jason directly to the reel (and thus, the fish). Jason asked kind of nervously if there was anything attaching him to the boat. . .and we all entertained a mental picture of Jason skipping across the water attached to the reel and fish, trying to extricate himself from the reel.

Darren was suggesting cutting the one line so that Jason could reel it in himself, but Jason (and I, who was holding onto the back of him) were like "no way!" After much give and take, they finally got the Marlin to the boat - and it became immediately clear that it was a good thing we didn't cut a line. Somehow the marlin had taken both bonitos (poor little fellas) without setting a hook, but the two hooks had gotten hooked to each other and then tailwrapped the fish (we essentially lassoed a Marlin!). We were able to get him aboard for a picture, estimated his weight at 225!