FIRST MARLIN FOR ANDREW WHITEHEAD

FIRST MARLIN FOR ANDREW WHITEHEAD

Dave MacLean has fished with us for years and on his last trip in early October 2011 he had a brilliant trip, including fighting a fish well over a 1000 pounds into the drak for nearly 5 hours that unfortunetly chafed through the 650 lbs leader. He missed last year but a couple of months ago he phoned me but all I had left was three days in December, which he took straight away.

Unluckly, after a month of beautiful calm weather he arrived on the 5^th, along with his sister and brother in law, Andrew exactly at the same time as a low pressure system moved in. However, despite the strong SE we decided to give it a go the next morning and by 6h30am were trolling a spread of lures down south in a very uncomfortable swell. As we tacked north we finally started to see some baitfish on the surface, mostly skipjack and caught a wahoo and released a nice great barracuda on the lures.

It was Andrew´s first ever deep sea fishing and I had given him all the in´s and out´s and finally at 9am the time come for him to get in the chair as a nice Black Inhaled the Blue & Pink Williamson BMC2 on the long right. The fish took off in a series of jumps and put us on the backing straight away. We quickly cleared and we in hot pursuit with Andrew puffing and sweating as he quicky recovered line. As we got close the fish made another series of jumps and trashed on the surface which gave us a break to get right on top of it. It then went down and I told Andrew to put up the drag, go to low gear and start the real work!  Eventually the fish come up, gave a couple of jumps and just before the half an hour Alex got the leader on a still very green fish. We got a couple pics, tagged the fish and let him go.