Tournament season has been a phenomenal success for the past two summers. After a stellar 33rd Big Island Marlin Tournament in mid-August, the Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series now heads in to the seventh and final tournament, called “It’s a Wrap” — for obvious reasons.
Although each tournament has a different scoring format and each one has winners, all teams score points with each fish caught and/or tagged and released and these points apply toward cumulative totals. At the end of the season, at the Wrap tourney awards, the Champion Series Angler and the Champion Series Boat/Crew are crowned.
The tables list the top ten anglers and the top ten Boats going into the final event.
Over the course of the summer, the catching has just been getting better and better, with the BIMT the high point, so far. There were 80 marlin were caught at the BIMT, with four weighed over 400 pounds. The largest was 1,035.5 pounds!
Fishing in general started getting dramatically better, starting back in February of 2018. And it’s not just summer — it is all year round.
Of course, one must consider the obvious question: Why? Why has fishing been so much better in the past two years, than any in recent memory?
First, one must look at how the fishery “works”.
The Big Island, at 4,028 square miles, is the single largest island in the central and south pacific until you get all the way west to New Zealand, New Caledonia and New Guinea. These South Pacific islands are all over 3,800 miles away.
In our northern hemisphere, it is just under 5,500 miles to any large island in the Philippines. Taiwan is another large island but there is nothing like the Big Island between here and there – a distance of just over 5,100 miles.
The north equatorial current flows in from the east and we are the first “boulder in the river” the current meets. The mountains of the Big Island create a giant lee area of calm surface water that allows the currents to eddy after coming through the Alenuihaha Channel, and around South Point. This eddy — or gyre — is a spawning ecosystem for many pelagic and reef fish species. In some areas along the coast, extreme depths are very close to shore. Nutrient rich upwellings come from the deep and provide fodder for larvae and fry that are quite tiny, and require specific dietetic components.
The Big Island “gyre” is a very unique combination of components that is unmatched by any other island, for many thousands of miles, in any direction. This ocean ecosystem is considered by many in the fishery science world to be one of the most significant spawning grounds in the entire Pacific.
On top of creating a spawning ground, fishery scientists have discovered that due to the isolation of the Hawaii islands, our ahi (yellowfin tuna) stock is for all practical purposes – residential in our islands.
Ahi in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere in Micronesia can island hop all the way across the North Pacific to the Philippines. In the South Pacific, they can island hop from Tahiti to the Coral Sea. Not so, here in Hawaii.
Be all that as it may, these are not the reason why fishing has become so much better. It is though, the reason why fishing could always be this good, if managed well.
The “cause and effect” reason why the fishing along the Kona Coast has been so good for 2018 and 2019 is surmised to be the product of the closure of fishing (within 200 miles) to the large boat commercial long line fleet, headquartered in Honolulu. Without the gyre being “fenced in” by hundreds of thousands of hooks dangling from lines that measure 40 miles or so (each) the ecosystem has been allowed to function “naturally” without large scale harvest and potential disruption of the balance of stocks — stocks that flourish when nature can do her thing.
The Hawaii deep set long line fishery was shut down in the Southern Exclusion Zone to the south and west of the Big Island, in January of 2018. This closure was triggered when long line vessels had a second interaction with false killer whales that NMFS considered as a mortal and/or serious injury.
In March of 2019, the shallow set long line fishery was closed down due to the fisheries interaction with a 17th loggerhead turtle, the cap on the number allowed.
Fishery scientist may call this surmisal “anecdotal”, but the tuna fishermen out on Cross Sea Mounts report experiencing the same sort of fishing improvement. The Cross Sea Mount is about 150 miles southwest of Kona.
Back in 2002, NASA scientists were working with satellites and studying the winds that also eddy in the lee of the Big Island. As expected they found that the immediate effects of the eddy dissipated about 300 kilometers to the west (about 186 miles) or about 35 miles outside of Cross. Unexpectedly, they also discovered that Hawaii’s “wake” is actually much larger than they thought. Surprisingly, it stretches about 8,000 kilometers (4,900 miles) across the ocean!
Using two other satellites that could detect ocean current, they discovered that a warm stream of water was actually flowing back toward Hawaii from Asia. The current was said to be slightly less than a degree warmer that surrounding waters, which is why it was not detected prior.
Provided that these findings from 2002 remain constant today, another “surmisal” can be made that since the ecosystem is actually so much larger than anticipated, not only is the gyre in the lee of the Big Island important to fish stocks and spawning, but, it may have more far reaching importance than for just local and regional fishing.
As an example, Dr. Andrew West, PhD studied larval and juvenile billfish in the Kona gyre as part of his PhD thesis. Although he found a number of larval species, he documented a number of striped marlin larvae in current slicks. Based upon a number of tests, they had to have been spawned in the eddy. Further, West stated that through mitochondria DNA analysis, they all came from different mothers.
The finding of larval striped marlin in the Kona gyre was considered odd at the time because all the big female striped marlin were thought to live down around New Zealand and Australia. Almost all of the small striped marlin caught in Kona were thought to be juvenile, so no one understood how larval striped marlin could turn up in Kona waters.
Between 2008 and 2011 striped marlin sub-samples of gonads were gathered at sea by observers trained by NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office in Honolulu. Analyzation of the samples showed that striped marlin around Hawaii are sexually mature at smaller sizes than in other areas of the Pacific – with maturity starting at only about 1.5 meters of body length.
Lots of striped marlin of this size and larger are caught in Hawaii, so this explains why the larvae were here – and – proves that the Kona gyre is a spawning ground for this overfished and depleted species of marlin.
While the status of the striped marlin stock has been scientifically proven to be overfished, is experiencing continued overfishing and is considered depleted, nothing was being done about it. In fact, large long liner landings actually increased in recent years, according to NMFS reports.
Wild Oceans is the oldest non-profit, non-governmental organization in the USA concerned with management and maintenance of healthy ocean fish stocks. Wild Oceans has actively taken a position advocating for the rebuilding of the striped marlin stock, through both NOAA/NMFS and proposals to the Western and Central Pacific Fishery Management Commission, the international body charged with management of pelagic fish that roam across numerous national boundaries.
Although this exercise is in a very early stage it is just one of many programs under consideration and/or being advance by staff and board members of Wild Oceans that have direct considerations for the fish stocks in and around Hawaii.
This ultimately benefits Hawaii small boat fishers of all types, because the large boat long line fleets and staff have exhibited no concern for rebuilding stocks like striped marlin.
For more information, see wildoceans.or.