900lb ++ Black marlin released at Bazaruto

Incredibly big fish being encountered at Bazaruto this year…reported in from Captain Duarte Rato on location…

Louwtjie and 5 of his mates come up for 3 days of fishing in mid October. Although they mostly wanted to do some plugging, fly-fishing, spinning and light tackle game fishing they ended up experiencing a hell of a Marlin bite. The charter started with a sailfish on light tackle right off the bat. Then the guys got into some beefy GT´s on jig and ended the day releasing a 250-pound Black Marlin. Then, the second day started with a 200-pound striped Marlin. We the spent most of the day spinning and plugging at 25-mile reef but seeing it was slow we decided to try for Marlin again in the afternoon and Lowtjie hooked a monster of a fish just after 1pm on a live skipjack. It was Louwtjies first ever Marlin but he did a brilliant job and we got the fish on the leader in just under an hour. Of course that was not the end of it and it took another half an hour of extreme drag to have it by boat side again. We think the fish would have gone over the 1000 pound mark had we decided to weigh it, but seeing we did we call it a conservative 900 pounds +++!

This giant Black Marlin was healthily released off Bazaruto (c) Captain Duarte Rato

The sheer size of this fish is incredible…easily 1000 pounds but conservatively called at 900lb ++ (c) Captain Duarte Rato