The marlin are close enough to taste – not that I know what they taste like, a possible explanation for all this warm water, and an HIBT update. It’s Monday – fire up the Fishing News!

I really thought the first marlin of the season would go this weekend, and it was probably only the crappy weather that stood in the way. The same system that had been messing up the water since midweek blew through the weekend, keeping most boats close to shore and even more in the slip. Those that got out got close, though, as both BLUE CHIP and HAWK lost marlin outside of the 14-Mile Bank and several others were seen in the region.

I was watching a repeat of the PBS special Superfish last night, and they mentioned something I didn’t know – pilot whales and Rizzo’s dolphins, two closely-related dolphin species, tend to hang out in the same conditions as billfish and are, therefore, a good sign. I’ve often seen Rizzo’s in our waters; I’ll watch for them a little more carefully in the future!

I haven’t heard of any private boater encounters with swordfish yet, but the stickboats are starting to get a few. They were really off to a slow start this year, but it’s starting to pick up. Not sure if it’s related to water temperature differences this year (more on that in a minute) or overharvesting or what.

We’re still waiting for our marlin to show up, but elsewhere the action is going off. Today was the first day of fishing at the Hawaiian Invitational Billfish Tournament in Kona. This is their golden anniversary, marking fifty years of events – by any standard, damned impressive. Equally impressive to me is that it’s five days long – man, that’s a lot of fishing! They’re something of a victim of their own success – their website is getting so much traffic it’s gone over its bandwidth limit – but Agnes Nulle over on the Facebook side has been good enough to pass along updates.

Keep in mind that it’s still very early, but 13 blue marlin have been tagged so far, with MARLIN MAGIC and KILA KILA leading the way with two each. Six spearfish have been tagged and six ahi boated; I don’t believe any marlin have been boated so far. It’s blowing 20kts, just enough to keep things interesting, and most of the catches are coming on 50-lb tackle, the lightest line class in the event. We should have more information for you in the Thursday report, and the final results next Monday.

I’ve been too lazy … er, busy … to check, but my perception is that the water seems to be running on the warm side this year. A quick stop by the folks at the National Weather Services’ Climate Prediction Center confirmed my suspicions – it’s El Niño time again. It’s hard to predict how it will actually work out, and the models indicate an increase in anywhere from 0.5°C to 2.0°C over normal. The bottom line? El Niño conditions will continue to develop and are expected to last through next year. Stay tuned …

I have all winter to do updates to the site, so you’d think that rolling into my thirteenth season I’d have this down to an art. And you’d be wrong. Every year, I manage to find some new project I want to do right as the season starts, and I just can’t postpone it. This year in particular you’d think I’d done about all I could do – new forums and photo hosting, converting the MarlinBlog to new software and creating a blog version of the Fishing News. But it was while I was playing with the MarlinBlog last week that I stumbled onto something pretty cool, and I just couldn’t help myself.

To me, what sets this site apart from many of our competitors is our history. There are bigger sites, there are more popular sites, but few go back as far as we do – we’ve got ten years of forum postings and fishing news reports. Having a history lets people look back to the past to get a glimpse of the future, and that’s critical for fishing success. Anyway, I was looking at the links I’d provided to the previous years non-blog format fishing news reports, and at the same time learning that I could back-date an entry on the MarlinBlog when it hit me – I could import all the Fishing News reports from the past into the new database, back-dating them to the original creation date. It literally took all weekend, but we now have every Fishing News report going back to 2000 as part of the new WordPress application. That means you can search them all by keyword using the search form in the right-hand column, or view all entries for a particular month or year using the pulldown menus. That’s pretty exciting to me, and it should be to you, too. Now, because we’ve changed a lot of things at the site over the years some of the links in the older reports don’t work, and I’ll slowly work through the kinks over time. But what an amazingly powerful tool we now have!

OK, I think we’ll stop here for now. Thursday’s report will include an HIBT update, more on the approach of the local marlin, a tuna update, and a little bit about the value of Trip Reports.