Soaking Up Invaluable Advice

© Lauren Doyle / RumBum.com

If you fish for big game like sailfish and marlin, chances are you’ve had your share of frustration on the water. You spend a lot of time dreaming of fishing, and a lot of money seeing to it that those dreams materialize. Then, you get a calm day on the water with no bites. Then, you see a marlin jump several yards away from your boat. What do you do?

Captain Ron Hamlin, aka Captain Hook, who has caught 26,000 billfish over his storied career, would tell you to do nothing at all.

Nothing?

Well, “unless he’s coming toward me, I just say, ‘Hm, there’s life here.’ If he’s coming toward me, I’ll go get him.”

This little gem was but one of many the Billfish Foundation treated an interested audience to at this year’s Billfish Expo held at Miami’s Marriott Biscayne Bay.

To be sure, "just wait patiently" was a theme of many of the discussions on how to catch billfish. Even if the fishing's bad? Yes. Just keep your line in. “Experiment with the fishing’s good,” Captain Hook said, not when it’s bad.© Lauren Doyle / RumBum.com

So, outside of experimenting, what can you do to make sure the fish are biting for what you’re offering? “Live bait has become more and more important,” Captain Hook said. Also, “quality of bait, variety of bait and even size.” And, make sure your bait’s got some wiggle left to it. If not, no one’s going to want it.

Continuing the conversation, Captain Ray Rosher suggests that if you're having problems out there on the water you should “change your depth, not your location.” Legendary Captain Bouncer Smith concurred, saying that sometimes marlin are 60 to 70 feet below the surface, but noting that, “If you have a south current and the water’s clean, fish in the shallow water.”

But the discussions weren’t just on how to catch marlin and other billfish, but how to catch them right – using the IGFA standards the Billfish Foundation promotes. In that vein, a lot of the talk centered around how to use circle hooks, the first of which were carved out of bone thousands of years ago, and are, the captains agreed, “time tested.”

Still, they're relatively new to the sport, and some angler's are slow to adopt to changing conservationist practices, including using circle hooks. While many captains swear by them, many others, it seems, don't understand that you have to change your technique when you change your hook. When using a circle hook, for example: Don't jerk the line, don't wind it too fast. And, "Don’t go into a panic crank. Just wind the line slowly,” Captain Smith said, asserting that once a fish is hooked with a circle hook, it’s not going anywhere.