Marlin over 1000 lbs., known as “granders” are regularly caught all over the world. Some are taken and some are released but here in Hawaii, we only count the ones that are actually weighted in. Some of the captains here have made the claim that they caught and released a grander and because of their experience, you can take their word for it that they did in fact release a grander but others who have made a claim to have released a grander are received with skepticism. Right before the close of 2011 the word went out that there was a possible grander coming to the scales for weigh in. I didn’t stick around for the weigh in but found out the next day that it only weighed in at 608 lbs. The crew on the boat is experienced so it didn’t make any sense why they thought it would make the grander mark but they only had egg on their faces for a little while because just 8 days later, they actually caught one and weighed in the first grander of 2012 at 1040 lbs. Hawaii’s first official “grander” was caught and weighted in 1954 and the count has continued at an average of slightly over 2 per year since. Hawaii Fishing News keeps the grander tally on their web site so now were up to 128 of them in Hawaii.
The striped marlin bite isn’t very good at all as we approach the middle of their season (bummer) but the spearfish showed up right on time and have been a fairly common catch. I’ve said it here before and I’m saying it again, those spearfish are one of the best eating fish there is! We had another little ono spurt this month and a few mahi mahi are still coming in. The yellowfin tuna are still hanging on the ledges and FAD’s but the numbers and sizes have dropped from last month.
The bottom bite has been a lot better lately with a good variety of fish but there’s hardly any bait fish at the bottom fishing grounds so I’ve been going to the closest FAD to the harbor for bait. It’s in the opposite direction from the bottom fishing grounds but the bait fish have been easy to catch along with the occasional eating size yellowfin as a bonus. I’ve also picked a couple of spearfish off the buoy while catching the bait fish and yesterday we got a spearfish on one of the bait rods. It was some good light tackle action and the spearfish made several jumps. That’s something that they rarely do on our normal size tackle and the more a fish jumps, the more likely it will come off but luckily I had a good angler that was able to handle it so it’s spearfish for dinner tonight :p
Last month I talked about the NLOM web site that predicts the speed and direction of the currents and I said that they were “fairly accurate” and that “with few exceptions; they were right on the money”. I’d now like to retract that statement and go back to “there’s no way to predict it”. Their predictions are updated once a week and they have their older predictions on the site also. Not only were their original predictions way off for most of January but even their most current current data(not a typo) is wrong. I’ll still be checking their web site regularly for reference but certainly not relying on it to be accurate.
