The Crew on Stalker Finds Sick Fishing on the Finger Banks
By Capt. George Sawley
Photos by Pat Ford
While stuck in the middle of a relatively slow blue marlin season in St. Thomas, my boss and I sat down to try and decide on our next fishing destination. Since we fished the last four fall seasons — and last spring — in Venezuela, we decided to try the Pacific side of Mexico, starting at Magdalena Bay and working our way back down to Panama and eventually back to St. Thomas.
Since we needed to cut our North Drop season early to make the loading dates to ship Stalker to Cabo San Lucas, it gave us just a few more days of fishing with Church Edwards and his 16-year-old son Chase in St.Thomas. Unfortunately, during those final few days a hurricane passed close to the island, bringing high winds and green water to the Drop. To beat the weather we decided to run 45 miles to Anagada and look for some clean water. The move paid off: Chase went four-for-five on the seven blue marlin we raised that day.
We were glad to get that last great day in, but as we packed up the next morning for the ride back to Florida, the radio went off, relaying one release after another. As the Boy Scout Tournament churned out record numbers, we faced a long ride home to put in three hard weeks of yard work. To make matters worse, as soon as we made it back to Florida, the shipping company called and said they were moving the dates back two weeks — we could have easily fished the Boy Scout and finished up the moon phase.
To add further insult to injury, while we were in the yard, reports from a fabulous fall bite in Venezuela started to surface. Boats were catching 20, 30 and 40 white marlin a day — the best bite in 10 years!
I definitely started to think that the whole Cabo thing might turn into a monumental mistake. To ease my worries, the dock master in Cabo told me the only thing she could confirm on dockage was that there was none — and that I was on the tail end of a very long waiting list.
Mexico
After an uneventful trip on the transfer ship, the day finally came to unload Stalker in La Paz, Mexico. I intended to run the 100 miles down to Cabo San Lucas, provision the boat, pick up one of the owners, Gary Mabry, and his wife, Susan, and then run to Magdalena Bay to fish for a week. As soon as I docked for fuel in Cabo, I ran into Terry Stansel, captain of the American Custom Yacht, Patriot. Stansel broke out the charts and showed me where the striped marlin fishing occurred the year before and where it started back up again this year.
Sticking to Stansel’s suggestions, we started trolling dead ballyhoo at a spot called the Finger Banks, about 50 miles out of Cabo. His report proved spot on — we raised over 20 stripeys and caught 10. Since it was another 150 miles up to Mag Bay, we decided to make the shorter run back to Cabo, planning to return to the Finger Banks the next day.
Our second day proved better than the first — we raised 40 stripeys before noon and caught 20. However, right at 12:30 or so, while fighting one of the largest fish of the day, we broke a shaft just behind the strut, leaving us short one prop.
To make repairs we chugged the entire way back to La Paz on one motor — over 150 miles at 7 to 8 knots — to a boatyard plucked right out of the 1930s. We ordered a shaft from the mainland side of Mexico that was supposed to arrive in less than seven days — it showed up 14 days later. I think it came by donkey.
As we waited patiently for the shaft, we heard about Reelaxe’s incredible day catching 179 stripeys and one sail. All I could think was, “Here we go again, off by another week.”
Because of the breakdown and yard delays, everyone’s schedule changed, and we couldn’t get back to fishing for another week even after completing the work. But our luck soon began to change. The dock master in Cabo found a slip for us, so we headed back there and left the boat over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Off to the Races
After the holiday I flew back to Cabo with Charles Nail, Elise Johnson and the Mabrys. The report we heard still put the stripeys on the Finger Banks, and several boats had caught 30 or more before the weather turned bad.
We started with dead baits right where we left off, and we were catching our share of fish when a local boat pulled up right in front of us and threw four live baits out, immediately hooking four fish. I watched him do the same thing all day — he easily outfished us two-to-one with the live baits. The next day we bought a dozen baits before heading out, and they lasted only a few minutes in the melee. Since the bait men were getting $24 a dozen, I needed to figure out how to catch my own, or we were going to go through a lot of cash!
I took another walk over to Stansel’s boat to find out where the mackerel lived — we had a boat full of sabikis and were ready to use them. Stansel told us to fish for bait on the Golden Gate, a hump 25 miles northwest of Cabo on the way to the Finger Banks. Just as he said, we marked the mackerel heavy on the recorder and caught them six or more at a time with the sabiki rigs.
We carried two 30-gallon livewells that held just over 200 baits, so we loaded them up and headed on to the Finger to do battle. We caught 60 stripeys that day, fighting four, five and six at a time. The next day we caught 80.
We worked as hard as hell to catch those 80 fish, and I couldn’t figure out how those guys on Reelaxe managed to catch 100 more than we could. I remembered a conversation I had with Ron Hamlin regarding the large numbers of sailfish he caught off Guatemala. He told me that the trick to catching big numbers was to just hook doubles — not triples or quads. Once the fish go in different directions, it takes too much time chasing after one while you’re dumping line on another.
The next day we gave it a try. As soon as we approached a baitball, I told all four anglers to cast, but as soon as two of them hooked up, I told the other two to reel in their baits while I backed up as quickly as possible. This little trick took us from catching 80 up to 100 in a single day. (We caught over 100 fish in a day six times during a two-week period, our best day being 118.) Here’s the real kicker — we only averaged five hours of fishing time per day.
People started giving us funny looks every time I told them we caught over 100, so I invited Stansel to come along as one of our anglers on the last day. The fishing seemed slow but we still managed to catch 115 stripeys — either we were getting used to catching more than 100 or were getting more proficient. My mates Kevin Rowland and Eli Arteaga more than earned their pay, never missing a beat. When one was on the wire, the other was baiting hooks or tying knots as fast as he could … they kept a rod in our anglers’ hands the whole day.
179 in a Day?
We were still stuck with the question as to how the guys on Reelaxe could possibly catch 179 in a single day.
People probably don’t realize just how tight these striped marlin were to the massive balls of sardines. As we ran up alongside these bait schools, I would pull the boat out of gear, and the anglers would cast into a feeding frenzy of birds, marlin, seals, dolphin and whales. Our anglers often hooked up mere seconds after the baits went over the transom.
Stripeys like to take to the air pretty quickly, and since they were only 40 or 50 feet from the boat on the hookup, we usually didn’t have to chase them down too far to get the release.
As an added bonus, the baitballs would sometimes make a dash for our wake, trying to hide in the wash or the boat’s shadow. When the mate grabbed the leader to release a fish, I would give the motors a quick kick to push the bait back out behind the transom. In most cases, 10 or 20 stripeys would rise up and chase them back under the boat, just as our next set of baits hit the water. When it was working just right, you could catch 10 in the blink of an eye.
This kind of action repeated itself for 17 straight days. We ended up catching 1,736 striped marlin in 27 fishing days between November 26 and January 16. I started doing a little math and discovered that when we fished with only two anglers, we averaged 20 fish an hour, upping that to 23 at our best.
We did this by bouncing from baitball to baitball, never running more than 200 yards to the next bunch of birds. This body of fish, bait and birds stretched more than five miles wide and 20 miles long on my radar screen, and we only fished a 5-mile stretch of it on any given day.
So, yes, if you catch 23 fish an hour during eight hours of fishing time, then you could catch 184 fish in a day … but I have no idea how many baits you’d have to carry to get it done.
