Big Game Fishing - Jigging - Popping worldwide

hi again everybody,

last weeks fishing was like sugar or salt: some boats fishing sao nicolao bank and others stayed at sao vicente. sao nicolao was quite good for some days with 10 catches reported within two days out of 20 bites. good days showed up like 5 for 11 bites with some days like 1 for 6 or 2 for 8 on HH1 with me as captain again for this year. plenty of small fish less than 300 lbs playing with our lures........and our nervs ! sao vicente was somewhat calmer on the number of bites but still they caught some fish and better sizes.
yesterday was slow at so vicente with only one blue was caught, same with the fishing at sao nicolao.
today we went out with our german clients frank and martin on HH1 and we could catch franks very first blue for him of 550 lbs with some dramatic jumps on the leader which for sure he will never forget ! finally we ended up catching a very strong fighting blue for martin with approx 600 lbs ! both fish were caught on bonzes lures ;-)
capt. simon could catch two blues for his russian clients, a 350 lbs and a 450 lbs.
all other boats caught one blue too.
the wheather is fantastic ; allmost no winds with calm seas everywhere !

hi david,
yep, was invited by paolo, the owner of "la onda emma" to help him to shoot the roe deers that still were to shoot on his plan for last year. so finally after my daughter was born in january, i couldn't stand it and flew over to roma where paolo picked me up end of february to go hunting in his beautiful hunting place close to bologna.
we managed to go stalking for 4 days and i was lucky enough to shoot 10 roes ! also i could see several "grander" size roe bucks which were protected that time, but i'm looking foreward to go there again for the bucks in august / september.

tight lines,
berno

hi everybody,

it took me a long time, but now i decided to sell
one boat of the HAPPY HOOKER FISHING TEAM, the HAPPY HOOKER, the 33
foot bertram. after 13 years of successful fishing in the worlds best
destination for atl. blue marlin, on that boat the most granders ever
were caught here, a total of 7 so far ! three times won the title
"captain of the year" for most releases worldwide and won the "4th of
july blue marlin world championship", the HAPPY HOOKER is for sale now.
if you are seriously interested to buy that boat, please send me a mail to marlinberno@capeverde-fishing. com

i have a fix price for the boat, no bargain! allready booked 21 days fishing for next year, so catch the boat now or i will take it out next year again.

berno

hello everybody,
now the really hot season has startet with up to 4 Marlin per boat a day. I was very unlucky the last 4 days fishing with 33 strikes and we scored 7 Blue Marlin up to 550 lbs , but we pulled the hooks on some bigger ones. To day we endet 2 from 11 and we had a lot of work in the cockpit. But thats fishing. The next days we will have a little bit more wind , maybe we go for a couple of days to Sao Nicolao and fish there in calm waters.
TL and calm see´s for ever
ciao Wolfgang

hello again,
another good day for us on the La Onda Emma . Today we scored 3 from 3 with a nice 550 on 50 lbs standup gear with some impressive jumps behind the boat.
tl Wolfgang

Hallo all you guys down in cape verde,
I am in Madeira for the season, but the fishing is still quite slow here.
We started talking about the shift in seasons, currents etc and some very interesting discussion took place.
I for one never knew that the prevailing currents that go past the Azores, Portugal, Madeira, and the canaries run from north to south.
What is the predominant current in Cape Verde?
Would anybody like to take a guess as to why the bite starts in the reverse order of the current - first Cape verde, then the Canaries, then Madeira etc.
Loking forward to see your theories posted here,
Regards,
Kas

Quoted from "gamefish"

Hallo all you guys down in cape verde,
I am in Madeira for the season, but the fishing is still quite slow here.
We started talking about the shift in seasons, currents etc and some very interesting discussion took place.
I for one never knew that the prevailing currents that go past the Azores, Portugal, Madeira, and the canaries run from north to south.
What is the predominant current in Cape Verde?
Would anybody like to take a guess as to why the bite starts in the reverse order of the current - first Cape verde, then the Canaries, then Madeira etc.
Loking forward to see your theories posted here,
Regards,
Kas

Hi Kas, I will come to Madeira too in the beginning of July. Maybe we can meet each other.
Best wishes,
Uwe

I was in Cabo Verde two weeks late May-early June. But since dvdgoli (David) was there first, I'll wait till he puts up his report first...

Gamefish, are you on the Omega? If you are, please tell Captain Allan Dustin says hello.. I'll be on the island in a few days and will say hi in person.

Best regards - patudo

Quoted from "gamefish"

Hallo all you guys down in cape verde,
I am in Madeira for the season, but the fishing is still quite slow here.
We started talking about the shift in seasons, currents etc and some very interesting discussion took place.
I for one never knew that the prevailing currents that go past the Azores, Portugal, Madeira, and the canaries run from north to south.
What is the predominant current in Cape Verde?
Would anybody like to take a guess as to why the bite starts in the reverse order of the current - first Cape verde, then the Canaries, then Madeira etc.
Loking forward to see your theories posted here,
Regards,
Kas

Um ... theory is certainly isn't Kas, more of a hypothesis or, at best, a guess.

But to start you're absolutely right the Gulf Stream, a clockwise rotating current in the North Atlantic, branches off the East coast of the 'States with a major element passing initially the Azores, Madeira (where there is a little eddying effect) down through the Canary Islands - it's referred to as the Canarian Current - Cape Verde and then at this point, off the coast of Senegal, is angled Eastwards - to the top of South America and the Caribbean - to complete that huge gyre.

So it's clockwise and as you say on the Eastern side of the Atlantic runs North to South. However, in terms of timing, Blue Marlin certainly appear to appear first off Cape Verde, then the Canaries, Madeira and the Azores in, apparently, the reverse sequence.

(On the other side of 'the Pond' though 'one run' of Blues are encountered in Venezuela and the Caribbean in April running up to places as far North - but only BIG fish - as New York in the late Summer months, early Autumn. Haven't quite speculated how that fits in to the overall picture!)

So I wonder are the fish using the counter-rotating current, that sits under the Gulf Stream to navigate?

(Certainly in the Indo/Pacific it's been proved (apparently) that Great Whites use a deep counter current to travel from South Africa to Western Australia. That's based on data from 'intelligent' Satellite tags.)

If they are or encountering land masses (and significant shoals of bait - the whole food chain's present in such areas) they them will temporarily stay before continuing their migration. Temporarily stay? My only reason for mentioning that is based on literally one tag retrieval. A friend of mine skippering in the Azores back in the early '90s tagged a fish on the Condor Bank, just to the South of the island of Faial, and re-captured the same fish 30 days later just 20 or so miles away on the Azores Bank South of Pico, the neighbouring island.

Still as I said sheer speculation on my part. Perhaps others have differing views? But the thought behind your original question the apparent movement of Blue Marlin in the Eastern Atlantic does appear to run contrary to the belief that the Canarian current affects their migration. I wonder, is there anything from tag returns that substantiates that apparent South/North movement?

Quoted from "PanamaJack"

..... the Gulf Stream, a clockwise rotating current in the North Atlantic, branches off the East coast of the 'States with a major element passing initially the Azores, Madeira (where there is a little eddying effect) down through the Canary Islands - it's referred to as the Canarian Current - Cape Verde and then at this point, off the coast of Senegal, is angled Eastwards - to the top of South America and the Caribbean - to complete that huge gyre.

.....

Kas
This - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co…derless%293.png - probably best illustrates the sweep of currents in the North Atlantic. You need to move the cursor to the right and down to view.

"............So it's clockwise and as you say on the Eastern side of the Atlantic
runs North to South. However, in terms of timing, Blue Marlin certainly
appear to appear first off Cape Verde, then the Canaries, Madeira and
the Azores in, apparently, the reverse sequence."

hmmmm, as the blues are here in cape verde all year around, i can not say they show up here first. the satellite tagged fish from here went one north, one north-west, one went west and two went south-east and south.
i can't see any equal migration route on that as they were tagged all within the same week.

if they would only swim with the current, we only would catch marlin here around x-mas............

tight lines,

berno

Quoted from "marlinberno"

.... hmmmm, as the blues are here in cape verde all year around, i can not say they show up here first. the satellite tagged fish from here went one north, one north-west, one went west and two went south-east and south.
i can't see any equal migration route on that as they were tagged all within the same week.

if they would only swim with the current, we only would catch marlin here around x-mas............

tight lines,

berno

Hi Berno
Of course I accept that Blues are caught year round in Cape Verde but what I was attempting to speculate - and speculate that's all it was - what was a apparent correlation of the major run of fish in those various fisheries to times of year. They're definitely caught in significant numbers first in Cape Verde, then the Canaries, Madeira and finally the Azores. Then again I know in the Canaries for instance they are occasionally taken 'out of season', and I've caught them in mid-October in the Azores - again out of the perceived season.

But is the reduced number of fish at those off times a factor of historic low catches - the consequence being a limited numbers of anglers take charters at those times? Or is it bad weather? Or is it lower surface water temperatures fooling us all? I talked about the Azores in October but going back subsequently in Octobers water temperatures were significantly down, but we were persisting trolling surface lures. Perhaps, given the massive amounts of structure off the islands, we should have tried livebaits down deep, perhaps the fish could have been holding down there? I guess we'll never know because us anglers look for bangs for our bucks and aren't willing to experiment so we end up with the classic Catch 22 situation - limited boat charters, therefore limited fish caught.

I was certainly interested in the returns from satellite tagging. Was that the year Andromeda came up from Ascension? I recall two of our members - Peter Gurd and Clive Taylor - catching fish that were subsequently tagged by the vessel - I can't remember its name - equipped with the satellite tags. Do you know whether or not any of that information is available on the Internet?

hi dave,

probably the blues are split in several size-class schools and swim different directions ? if the many small size fish of lets say 150 to 300 lbs that we see here would immegrate north, we would see the same amount of small size fish at the northern islands from the canaries to azores, but that seams not to happen.
i only got one report of recapture of all the hundreds of marlin that i tagged, and that fish was caught and killed 9 days after release some 45 nm away from where i let him go.

mr. st. campbell tagged several fish here for his own pleasure with his own satellite tags but never told anybody where "his" fish showed up again.......

the year when peter and clive passed some fish over to trevor cockle on the hooker (madam & hooker) was on andromeda's first season here. trevor fished around us with some guys from TBF which braught 10 sat-tags, but unfortunately trevor had no luck and couldn't catch any blues in those days, so they took several fish beeing caught from us to tag blues.
the following year i got the yearly book from the billfish foundation and what i wrote before thats where they moved and where the tags showed up again. remember that the longest period to stay with the fish will be 3 month before the tags pop out.

maybe if you write to TBF you could find out about the routes, if they are willing to tell you.........

tight lines,

berno

Many Thanks for your reply Berno. And your point about the run of smaller fish that you see early on in the season - that don't, in general, appear to migrate North - does put an interesting perspective on it.

Back to one of my original points - the possibility of Marlin using a counter current, under the Canarian current - to migrate North. I wonder, if that's the case, the larger fish are more tolerant of lower water temperatures and oxygen levels? The returns from those White Shark taggings that I mentioned - the trans-oceanic migrations from South Africa to the West coast of Australia - suggested that for significant parts of their journey they were down very deep. (Let me try and find the link and I'll post a note of it on this thread.) I'll also try contacting the TBF and see whether their satellite tags similarly monitored depths at which the fish were swimming - I presume, in the case of the sharks, that must have been based on some form of pressure sensor.

All the Best

Quoted from "PanamaJack"

....

The returns from those White Shark taggings that I mentioned - the trans-oceanic migrations from South Africa to the West coast of Australia - suggested that for significant parts of their journey they were down very deep. (Let me try and find the link and I'll post a note of it on this thread.)

....

Here's the thread Berno - Great Whites - Carcharodon carcharias. I know Great Whites are more 'temperature tolerant' but the summary - noted in post 1 - described the fish, nicknamed Nichole, diving to depths approaching 1000 metres on its epic journey.

hello everybody, really funny that all fish this year in the Tournament was from the north Atlantic.On Cabo Verde fish 3 Boats the Competition and we have 2 Blue Marlin over 500 lbs . Berno did a really great job on his big Marlin just 2mls behind us. We hat later in
the afternoon on our Boat, La Onda Emma ,a 511 lbs Marlin out from 6 strikes .Worldwide fish arround 140 Boats this day and only Cabo Verde, Madeira and La Gomera catch fish.
In the Moment are some big Marlin arround, Dona Pi lost yesterday a 700 + on the Leader. 2 Boats are fishing in the Moment in front of San Nicolao with up to 14 strikes a day with some bigger Marlin between.
TL
Wolfman

Quoted from "wolfman"

In the Moment are some big Marlin arround, Dona Pi lost yesterday a 700 + on the Leader. 2 Boats are fishing in the Moment in front of San Nicolao with up to 14 strikes a day with some bigger Marlin between.
TL
Wolfman

Hi Wolfgang,

thank you very much for the update. Seems it is a very good fishery after the main season there.

Some more informations I heard today: "Cape Verdes (July 14) - Capt. Zak Conde got the numbers, going 4-15 on blues. Weights were 550, 450, 350 and 300."