Big Game Fishing - Jigging - Popping worldwide

It’s not an area any of our Club members, that I can recall, have fished however looking at this YouTube video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgb4hVOJzPM – I suspect the techniques employed - drift fishing with fluorocarbon leaders and chumming with small whole fish - will be similar to those employed in the Adriatic. (Um ... in terms of the video, not exactly to IGFA rules!) So perhaps some of the other forum members with experience from the Croatian fisheries could comment?

Given the over-fishing of Bluefin in the Med I understand that there are now just the three fixed net fisheries remaining on Sardinia and that, over recent years, average weights are starting to show a marked decline.

Wishing you every success in the tournament.

Quoted from "skip"

Thanks for the info. We just came back today, first day's fishing was cancelled due to Force 7-8 winds and on the second day we fished in a restricted zone up to only 12nm miles offshore in Force 5 wind conditions. Sadly out of 40 boats only 3 got valid fish and only then 1 each with the winning boat gettting 1 22.5kgs Med Sailfish.

Hi Skip,

never ever heared from a Med Sailfish! Do you mean the Med. Spearfish?

Spent 2 weeks at Porto Cervo some weeks ago and talked with some crew guys of the game boats there. Most of them told me the same stories.
Bad fishing on the "costa smeralda" side of the island. Sometimes really big "tonno rosso" are cought in the channel between corsica and sardegna.
But the sea is quite rough most of the time in this area... for this reason only the bigger boats fish out there normally. Further they told me that
it is quite difficult for tourists who are interested in doing "selfmade fishing" there to get a box of baitfish for an acceptable price to chum the thunas...

TL

saily

Quoted from "saily"

....

never ever heared from a Med Sailfish! Do you mean the Med. Spearfish?

....

Hi Saily
It similarly intrigued me. Apart from Broadbill and Spearfish I had heard of the occasional White Marlin being reported, but never Sailfish until, googling, I picked up this reference - http://arabianwildlife.uaeinteract.com/current/sailfish.html. But there're not, as I would have initially suspected, Atlantic but Indo/Pacific Sailfish that have migrated through the Suez Canal. Really don't know what scientific proof there is though - tag returns or DNA testing.

Views on fish distribution does seem though to be a bit of an inexact science. I was with one of our members off Panama - Pacific-side - when he caught a small Tuna which, when quizzed, the crew just called a Bonito. Live bait sized fish are always Bonito. On closer examination though we identified it as a Kawakawa, a supposed rare, accidental visitor to the Pacific east of the Hawaiian Islands. But we've also hooked, and one member has landed, a Tarpon - Megalops atlanticus - from that Pacific coastline, presumably fish whose ancestors migrated through the Panama Canal.

Back to the Sailfish though that Skip reported. Yup, it might just be a translation issue. But if it was a Sailfish I wonder whether it was an Indo/Pacific or its Atlantic cousin that would have entered the Med through the Straits of Gibraltar? They do occasionally encounter them in the Canaries.