Kurt Saraceno
The Nantucket Big Game Battle took place last Thursday-Saturday (August 10-12). The BGB is a tournament that takes place annually to raise money for charity.
Starting on Thursday night, the captains' meeting took place in the Boat Basin to review any new rule changes and gave crews the opportunity to share intel before the next couple days of fishing.
Our plan was to do a day trip to the edge on Friday in search of all different types of tuna and marlin. We left at 2am and after we made it through Maskeeget Channel, the captain pointed the bow of the boat towards East Atlantis.
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Location
We chose to fish East Atlantis Canyon due to the slow reports from the other canyons, plus the Roffs Report showed good clean Gulf Stream water hovering over East Atlantis.
After the three hour chug through darkness, it was finally time to put lines in just a couple miles short of the canyon. Trolling a mixed spread of spreader bars, one daisy chain, a few different marlin teasers and some ballyhoo, would hopefully give us an opportunity to hook anything that swims out in the deep.
At around 8am, in around 73 degrees just East of East Atl, the port long rigger with a green splash bar got taken down hard by a fish with some size. Running deep into the braid backing, one of the crew members Brendan Burke (who is an expert fishing all over the world but specializes in canyon fishing) started to pump the fish in.
After about 15 minutes, we finally saw deep color as the large yellowfin tuna pinwheeled. We were able to stick a gaff in the 70lb yellowfin and haul him aboard. In the BGB yellowfin are worth 100 points.
We set the lines back out and an hour later the purple machine bar on the short rigger gets hit. Another 15 minute long fight resulted in another yellowfin for the box putting our point total up to 200 points.
As I was letting the center rigger marlin lure back, line started to be stripped off the reel at a faster pace, so I locked the drag up and a 50 or 60 pound white marlin began jumping across the spread before eventually spitting the hook. The white marlin ate a Tahitian Prowler made by Black Bart Lures.
Around 1pm we trolled our way over to Veatch Canyon and again the Tahitian prowler gets hit, but does not come tight. I immediately dropped back our flat line ballyhoo rig and hooked up a beautiful 18lb mahi mahi.
Unfortunately we did not get a chance to fish the second day of the tournament due to the rough and rainy weather. Our final point total was 210 and we did win the team challenge.
The top few boats in the tournament went to Oceanographer Canyon, which produced multiple bigeye, marlin, and yellowfin for the boats that fished there.
Yellowfin bites came on Sterling Tackle and Carlson Bars. Marlin and mahi bites came on the Tahitian Prowler and naked ballyhoo.
Tight lines and best of luck if you head to the Canyons this week,
Kurt​
This sounds like interesting off shore adantures that can lead to big rewards!