• The first Black Marlin Fishing Blog monthly email newsletter is out now. If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do so here.
• A story from Towcam’s John Faulkner that he’d like to call–”Shut up and listen!” John took his boat Five Star out from the Gold Coast seaway with just him and a mate on board for their usual Sunday, to get some towcam vision.  John reports “Calm crisp weather, the SST charts showing good water temp at 80m we arrived to find good bait mid-water. After a quick drop and just one huge slimy, we decided to pull lures. (After listening to GCGFC guest speaker Capt. Ross McCubbin recently on striped marlin techniques.)  We scanned with the 360deg sonar for bigger schools, found a good patch of bait stacked up high in the water and marked a few large fish so we pulled up and let the lures sink and pulled them into the bait. Double hook up striped marlin!
  One took off leaping all lit up along side the boat and the other the opposite direction. Throttles mashed, we tried to take up the slack, but with only 8kg gear, none of the hooks set and exit 2 nice striped marlin. Unreal this is July isn’t it? With only 1 horse slimy in the tank we circle hooked that out on a new virgin baitcaster on braid and slow trolled back into the same bait we had marked, instant hook up!  Over 90 minutes later and after too many attempts at a tag shot, we lost the fish, a nice frisky 130kg black marlin.
  Lessons learned = Should have taken the 15kg outfits, listened while McCubbin was speaking and most importantly, always push record!“
• The Townsville Billfish Bonanza was postponed again due to the weather and things are not looking too good for this weekend’s Yorkey’s Knob tournament either.  Also, please note that due to the Federal Election on August 21, the big Yorkey’s Knob tournament, the Norship Marine Light Tackle Slam has been moved to September 10-12.  More information on the Tournament Calendar.
• Listening to Fish Talk on the weekend we heard from Capt. Ken Bryant that the little black marlin are thick in the Whitsundays.  Touching base with both Shaka and Iona II who are spending some time amongst the islands at present and neither have heard that rumour but are keen to get out and have a look!
• Warning dead fish–>whispers this last week of a 600kg blue marlin in Tahiti but perhaps not caught on rod and reel.  (Unless you already read french) you can read the google translation of the newspaper article here with picture here.

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