Learning to billfish on small boats

[Hatterized]

cool informative read Bill......

thanks for sharing some proven expertise with us.....

[mythosbeer]

Excellent read! This definitely gave me some great ideas, especially since we have a 26' prokat. I liked the idea of having rod holders on the transom ladder arms too, as well as the loops for the teasers.

Mitch

[Devious]

Thanks for an excellent read!

[SeaBiscuit]

Very good write up, thanks Bill. Most such articles focus primarily on the spread, teasing and hooking the fish. Focus on the end game is particularly important when fishing in a small boat and this article addresses that well.

May I recommend a follow up article on the culinary pleasures of bill fish loins?

SeaBiscuit

[Captain Fred Archer]

We here at SuperBars Inc. dearly love marlin and other pelagic fishing from small boats. The "up close and personal" style of that kind of fishing is hard to beat. And IMO, if there's a "Little Marlin Boat City", it's down in the Baja, where small boats and especially the ubiquitous panga dominate when it comes to catching marlin and everything else.

We fish both armed lures and far more commonly, the teaser bars that allow us to pick and choose what species or size fish we want to bait and the right size tackle to fight them with.

Here's how we do it with the armed teasers. The boys are making lots of radical turns and complete, tight circles to show how well our bars handle that sort of thing without tangling. The big ones are RuckusRaisers and the smaller ones are Marlin DaisyBars in this sequence.

Bait & switching with bar teasers video (complete with marlin and many other fish ) coming. Stand by.

Special thanks to our cameraman Wally and his "Wally Copter".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkxGZXJWHhc

[Squidnation]

We here at SuperBars Inc. dearly love marlin and other pelagic fishing from small boats. The "up close and personal" style of that kind of fishing is hard to beat. And IMO, if there's a "Little Marlin Boat City", it's down in the Baja, where small boats and especially the ubiquitous panga dominate when it comes to catching marlin and everything else.

We fish both armed lures and far more commonly, the teaser bars that allow us to pick and choose what species or size fish we want to bait and the right size tackle to fight them with.

Here's how we do it with the armed teasers. The boys are making lots of radical turns and complete, tight circles to show how well our bars handle that sort of thing without tangling. The big ones are RuckusRaisers and the smaller ones are Marlin DaisyBars in this sequence.

Bait & switching with bar teasers video (complete with marlin and many other fish ) coming. Stand by.

Special thanks to our cameraman Wally and his "Wally Copter".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkxGZXJWHhc

cool stuff fred. thanks. let me add that we only troll teaser chains in guatemala because they made a decision long ago to not allow dredges of any kind. the reasoning behind this is that hamlin thought that one could condition a fish to only raise to dredges and that would eliminate the more exciting teaser chain bite. not sure if I agree how one could train 50,000 sailfish but hey, when in rome. be assured back at home we got the dredges out all the time. your ruckus raisers are kinda of a mix between dredge and bar. wonder if we could keep from getting the great guatemalan curse wammy put on us by trolling one of your ruckus bars. I have had the wammy curse put on me once in guatemala but thats a whole differnet article

as for marlin loins slip here ya go

two lbs of marlin finely chopped in cubes
1 can of v8
4 lemons
cilantro
finely chopped onions and tomatos and garlic
1 finely chopped jalapeno if desired
two squirts of worstershire sauce
chill for an hour

add some leatherback turtle soup as an appetizer and you are shittin in the tall grass my friend. hmmmmmmmm good!

[Squidnation]

A little more about Buena Vista Sportfishing Lodge

http://www.youtube.com/user/Buenavis...h#play/uploads

check it out and come join the crew down in Guatemala this winter

[Captain Fred Archer]

Thank you for the kind words, Bill. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a competitor with class, like you and others. This is a small, tough business that we are in, mostly for our love of fishing and not to make a financial killing of any kind, and we compete like hell, but that's no reason not to respect one another and to maintain cordiallity.

"Training sails about dredges"? Hmm, the less I say about that, the better . In our case we actually tried to avoid the sails in Mex because we vastly preferred to target the stripers, blues, and blacks, along with the various meatfish. The Pacific sail is not in the same fighting class as the Atlantic, at least in our opinions, so the marlin are the preferred target most of the time.

That's one of the reasons why bait & switch fishing was and is the far more greatly preferred way for us to troll down there. Not only can we avoid the sails if we're after marlin, the usual case, we have a great deal of control over what species, size, and number of meatfish we deal with, plus that matching the tackle to the fish thing is a big deal in venues with lot's of species and sizes.

And, of course, those meatfish can become a real pain in the arse if you are after the bills and you have to deal with hooking and catching them, instead of the marlin. Fact is, a bunch of little tunas, mahi's, skipjacks, or whatever mindlessly trying to attack a couple of teasers make for the finest kind of "natural teaser" there is. Personally, I wouldn't give up that flexibility for blind trolling, big boat or small, for anything.

Although the RuckusRaiser does double as a dredge and a spreaderbar, we prefer the Spiders for deep fishing, be it off of sinkers, downriggers, or planers due to the simple expedient that it generates less water pressure and pull. And they too make very good spreaderbars up top. You can see that pretty clearly in the video on Spiders. We are producing underwater video of them moving fast.

Thank you again for the nice words and catch 'em up!

(Oh, yeah, almost forgot...put up them dukes )

[Carla Dee]

[QUOTE=Squidnation;753580]cool stuff fred. thanks. let me add that we only troll teaser chains in guatemala because they made a decision long ago to not allow dredges of any kind. the reasoning behind this is that hamlin thought that one could condition a fish to only raise to dredges and that would eliminate the more exciting teaser chain bite. not sure if I agree how one could train 50,000 sailfish but hey, when in rome. be assured back at home we got the dredges out all the time. /QUOTE]

squidly, i'm pretty sure, whatever hamlin says publicly, the reason not to pull dredges has only to do with the charter industry. it is more cost effective and less labor intensive.

along with the fact that it obviously isn't critical to putting up the big numbers with that many fish around!

[WAHOONBOX]

SUPERB THREAD AND WRITING!