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Fishing as the next Olympic Sport ?
OK – I get some of it. Watching the guy with the flaming red hair risk life and limb on a snowboard clearly demonstrates the triumph of skill, practice and confidence over the fear of defying gravity, but I have to admit some of the other wintersports are not quite so entertaining to me and could easily be replaced by the most popular participant sport in the western hemisphere – fishing.
The luge event you have to admire – if you remember back to being out of control on a sled when you were young, imagine what it would be like with your face only a couple of inches from the ice, but now you’re doing 10X the speed ? Talk about adrenalin ! If they have one such race though – do they really need the “skeleton” ?? Face-forward doing ninety miles an hour I’m sure is exciting for the athlete, but it is still just sledding – what about replacing it with ice fishing ?
Same thing for the summer; if the Olympic Committee managed to get their heads around including “Croquet” in the summer games (1900) or “Tug of War” (1920), surely they could consider sportfishing ? All catch and release of course.
Maybe we should start a new campaign to have winter/summer complementary fishing exhibition sports in the next games. We just need to raise about $20m for lobbying, as of course we would have to fly the whole Olympic Committee to all the best sportfishing locations in the world for a couple of years so that they could convince themselves that 20 million fishermen may not be wrong about it being one of the most technical and exciting sports on the planet. Obviously we should start with Guatemala to ensure that they have a great first experience and all catch fish !!
Testifying to this recently were the Rivers Group who fished with us last week, bringing 91 sailfish to the boat over the course of 3 days. Other groups had similar results, on average raising over 30 billfish per day at about 30 miles from the dock. All of this happened as we approached the new moon, which is often regarded as one of the best moon phases to chase predatory fish.
Since then, the fishing has slowed down a bit, but even in Guatemala we don’t raise those kind of numbers consistently every day ! Recent days have seen raises of about half that amount – in the 10-15 range – but still plenty of action, and importantly plenty of bait in the water.
See the latest satellite imagery here
There has been a strong current pushing down from Mexico, and the Captain’s have been on the lookout for Striped Marlin – which would be unusual in these waters, as we see mostly Blue Marlin and the odd Black Marlin – but it would certainly make for some exciting action and great photos !
The good fishing however (and hopefully !) will continue until the end of April and even into May we have seen a strong and sustained Marlin bite – so in that regard the season here in February is only just starting !