Big Blue Marlin Caught Off Corn Islands, Nicaragua
Good day,
The other day while I was diving for lobsters, a gentleman from Big Corn Island drove his boat over and took out a monstrous blue marlin for all to behold. They are incredibly rare around these parts but everyone knows they are around. This creature is arguably the “king of the sea” with no real predators besides a great white (occasionally) and even then they aren’t really scared, just if they are weak but you get the idea. Suffice to say catching one around these parts is kind of a “big deal” where as monstrous barracuda and king fish are the flavor du jour.
Here’s the deal on how it went down, supposedly. The gent you see in the photos was out and about in the channel between Big & Little Corn Island doing some bottom fishing with a hand line, no doubt. Basically you find a place where there are fish and drop a line down with this heavy weight, once it hits bottom your bait floats about 1-3 feet off the bottom and the small fish hit it up. This is all fun and good and the gent above hooked a nice fish and began to pull it into the boat.
While bringing said fish up to the boat like any other fish, something singular happened and a large blue marlin devoured the game fish and got hooked. Supposedly the gents rope just went nuts but luckily he had lots of line. The fish ran and ran and ran and they had no clue what they had hooked because remember – in the ocean ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. A few hours later they had finally beat the beast and managed to catch the first blue marlin in ages / memory.
Not sure how deep it is in the channel between the Corn Islands but blue marlins are typically caught in blue water aka these beasts and top of the food chain predators spend most of their lives way out at sea. The cool thing about the Corn Islands is that we are way out at sea. Besides these two small land masses, it’s just open blue water for ages. This fish is huge but it’s still not a large marlin, females often average four times the size of the males and often exceed 1200lbs, wow.
Would like to thank the jovial Julie who works at Tranquilo for photos. #SHABL.
