We set out on a hot July day to explore the tuna canyons south of Freeport, Bahamas and to also explore the Northern section of the Berry Islands around Great Harbour Cay. With a crew of Carson, Brandon, Billy, Steve and myself, we made the run to Lucaya in flat seas and fished the tuna canyon that afternoon with live bait (greenies and sardines caught off Juno Pier). We caught 5 nice yellowfins with the largest around 60 lbs. The next day we explored the flats on the North Side of Grand Bahama Island and finally ran into a large school of bonefish, numbering about 500 fish. They spooked after we hooked one and we looked for them for an hour in 90+ degree heat and a blazing sun. We bugged out back to the Makara looking for shade and headed out to spearfish 40 miles East of Lucaya that afternoon.

Billy and Carson speared some nice hogfish and a grouper. Unfortunately the blood trail attracted a 8 ft reef shark that, after circling them in the water, came at them. Billy poped the shark in the head with his pole spear and Capt Steve backed the Makara down. We got the divers out of the water safely and called it a day.

We ran down to the Northern Berry Islands to check out Ambergris Cay, which is a massive bonefish flat located 20 miles North of our favorite spot, Chub Cay. Unfortunately the water must have been in the mid 90s and we didn't see any bones. Caught some cudas in the slot and spent the night on the anchor in some beautiful grass flats. We caught some nice mutton snappers then headed back to Lucaya to end the trip.

The yellowfin tuna fishing has been awesome South of Lucaya this year. The upwelling in the Tuna Canyon just attracts large schools of bait. The fish are bigger and you can always find them after 5 or 6 pm when they start to feed on the surface. We did not see or hear about any dolphin being caught. The water at 88 degrees is just too hot for the green monsters.

We will probably wait until the weather cools off before our next trip. Will let you know when we head out again. I will post some pictures from our whale shark trip to Isla Holbox, Mexico soon.

We received a report from Don Hammond that a 25 inch dolphin we tagged (tag #X04107) on April 9, 2007 near Chub Cay, Bahamas was recaptured by a commercial fishermen off Brunswick, GA on May 30, 2007. We estimate the fish traveled 560 miles over a 51 day period. The report included that the fish was 33 inches in length when recaptured, equating to an 8 inch length increase over the 51 days. According to Don Hammond, dolphin are reported to grow 2 inches per week in tropical waters.

We have tagged over 300 dolphin so far in 2007. This is our second recapture with the first one being reported back on May 1, 2007 having traveled only 30 miles from the same tag site as X04107. We will be back on the water tagging during the last week of July. Before that we head back to the Yucatan to Isla Holbox to dive with whale sharks with Dr. Rachel Graham as part of a long term study that includes tracking these magnificent fish off Belize, Mexico and Madagascar. I will report back with pictures and hopefully video clips from this next expedition. In the meantime write me at tom@mvftag.com with questions or comments.

Circle hooks versus J hooks

I know the issue of J versus circle hooks has been settled with numerous studies showing the high mortality. MVF funded a study back in 2003 with John Graves from VIMS showing that one third of all white marlin caught with J hooks died within 1 week. He employed pop-up psat tags to obtain this data. NMFS came out with a ruling earlier this year to ban J hooks from any billfish tournament on the East Coast. Unfortunately the reaction from the multi-million dollar tournaments forced NMFS to postpone the new rule until 2008. It is hard to change your fishing techniques after years of success. Circle hooks force captains and mates to learn to rig differently: no more flashy skirts, islanders or seawitches... makes rigging baits boring, to say the least.

I must be honest and say we use both circle and J hooks on the Makara and have resisted eliminating J hooks from use especially in the dolphin tagging study. The pictures posted in an earlier blog of the dead sailfish, and Billy digging the J hook out of his gut moved me. I hate change just like everybody else, but either we quit fishing or we change our ways. We cannot kid ourselves that our boat's fishing tactics do not make a difference. They do. We need to change how we fish to protect the fish.

The waters off Cancun and Isla Mujeres are full of fish. There is less fishing pressure now: no live bait allowed except by local captains and the use of circle hooks have ensured the highest survival rate of migratory billfish, and dolphin continue strong into the Gulf and up the East Coast. East Coast and Gulf fishermen need to wake up and do the right thing for the fish and themselves. Circle hooks.

Expedition completed, Makara back home

The crew brought the Makara back to its home port in North Palm Beach this week. The team fished 11 days off Isla Mujeres, had 237 fish events- tagged, released, missed or boxed. We tagged 134 dolphin plus one wahoo. We also caught a number of billfish. We went 7 for 10 on white marlin and 12 for 26 on sailfish. On a different measure, we traveled an average of 70 miles per day to fish. The fishing grounds were about 15 miles offshore so we averaged around 40 miles of trolling per day.

Our best tagging day was June 2, 2007 when we tagged 36 dophin. Our worse day was June 11, 2007 where we did not catch a single one. We knew there was a Spring migration off Isla. Our goal was to tag enough fish to find out where they go once they leave. We suspect they follow the current and head North in the Gulf or around Cuba up the Florida Straits. For now we are beginning our planning for the next tagging expedition and wait to see if any of our tagged fish are recaptured.

I want to say thanks to Captain Steve Unsell and Mate Billy Gerlach for great work during the trip. The got the Makara ready to go and kept it running smoothly the whole trip. Billy worked every night preparing 6-8 dozen baits for the next day. I also want to thank the Shelby Jihad - Jim, Carter, Mateo - for coming down and helping out in the cockpit. I'll have more to say about the rest of the crew in another blog...

Update: 130 dolphin tagged

We thought the small schoolie dolphin had all passed thru migrating North for the summer, but we were wrong. A school of dolphin hit the spread and we had 6 fish hooked up in less than a minute. We were able to tag 20 fish and increase our trip tag count to 131 tags deployed.

Our fishing effort has been well-defined along the edge of the shelf off the Yucatan Pennisula. We have worked a 30 mile section of the reef in depths ranging from 100 to 400 feet. The dolphin and sailfish bites have been evenly distributed throughout the area, but the white marlin bites have only happen in the northern portion of the reef. We are still analyzing our fishing effort tracks to understand more about this. As soon as we complete the analysis we will post the tracks and tag locations on our website.

One note about navigational charts for this area is that they have not been updated in some time. You will note in the map above the extensive size of the Aerosmith Bank location. We found the size and depths displayed for the bank were off as much as 3 miles in places and totally inaccurate. Part of this may stem from the fact that the pinnacle mount dates are from 1947.

Some of the future work of the Makara will be to accurately detail bottom topography along with our track and tag points in selected fisheries. This is the topic of future blog posts about the development of a fishing effort/catch GIS tool for use by recreational fishermen. Stay tuned.

Two Week Update

We have now been in Mexico for two weeks. In eleven days of fishing we have tagged 111 dolphin and one wahoo. Plus we placed a Microwave Telemetry pop-up satellite tag on a 58 inch male dolphin. This was only the 5th sat tag ever placed on a dolphin. 76 of the tags were deployed during our first three days when schools of small dolphin were still in the area. During the last 8 days of fishing we have caught much larger dolphin, but did not find any big schools.

We tried deep dropping on a few different spots south of the island and on Arrowsmith bank. We caught a wide variety of fish including a pink porgey, tilefish, button snapper, 2 black snapper, and 3 mystic groupers. The last drop of the day we pulled up this ugly brute pictured below. Its a large mystic which weighed close to 50 lbs.














After several straight days of fishing it was time for a short break. We spent today snorkeling on a few of the reefs surrounding the island and relaxed a bit by the pool. Tomorrow we are going out trolling again to tag additional dolphin. The fish are large and difficult to tag but these are the ones we were targeting on this trip. We are using circle hooks on dolphin today. In the past days we have been using J hooks knowing we could hook them fast without a drop back, get a simple mouth hook and release them without injury. One of the consequences of using J hooks is gut hooks and a 30 percent chance of mortality. We will explore how these circle hooks work today using drop back techniques and report back.

J hooks and dead billfish

We completed our 10th day of tagging dolphin yesterday. We have placed 110 tags on dolphin and one tag on a small wahoo. One of the unfortunate parts of fishing is the needless killing of billfish from the use of J hooks instead of circle hooks. We saw this dead sailfish in the water, brought in the boat and did a quick investigation of its mouth, gills and stomach. We discovered a size 3/0 J hook in its stomach. The fish still had color so it must have died just recently.
Marine Ventures funded a project in 2002 with John Graves at VIMS to investigate the mortality rates from both J and circle hooks on white marlin. The results were clear that post release death was around 30% for J hooks and less than 5% for circle hooks. While the US government is still struggling to implement a circle hook rule, anglers need to come to terms with their own choice of hooks. The more J hooks used, the fewer billfish. It is that simple. We each have to step up and assume responsibility for our fishing techniques. Regardless of the impact of longliners or other foreign fishing fleets, we each need to do our part to protect these awesome fish.Panel