The marlin was weighed and brought 225 kg on the scale which is just short of 500 LB (495) We hooked it some 20-30 miles southwest to Puerto rico (the village, not the Island) in Gran canaria. We were lucky to get it in as it was bill wrapped and bill hooked and it made some terrific jumps out of the water. The fight took a little over 20 minutes which is quite short for such a fish but it made some spectacular runs. The short time of the fight was also due to the captain who was excelent in driving the boat and the excelent crew. The boat we had has standard 3 experienced crew on board when they are trolling for the big stuff. The hook was bent at it was a large high quality hook. They only use full mono on all the reels that are used for trolling
The fish don't come easy in the Canaries but when they do they can be big (2-3 times large than this one) and that is why they are using big stuff. They only use 130 lb Shimano Tiagra's (they have 6 of those) and for the smaller rods for the by-catch they use 50W (tiagra's and accurate ATD's) as a minimum. So that's the reason why my Omoto Poseidon Q16-II and Penn Travel rod stayed in the cabin. If I want to fish my own stuff in that region I need to buy something else.
They also use 600 LB leaders which I thought was a little overdone until they told me that they lost a marlin a day earlier because it wacked the leader with it's tail and broke the 600 lb leader.
We had one marlin in 23 hours (two days of 9 hours and one day of 5 hours) of trolling time and we are still luckey cause there are not that many caught. Not much by-catch either with two small bonito's so there is a lot of time that you can only wait. Of-course it was worth it but you need quite a lot of stamina and we were tempted to go bottom fishing on several occasions. Just glad that we didn't
As soon as you leave the protection of the Island you are in the open Atlantic sea and with 6 beaufort the water get's rough. You need a strong twin powered boat to fish over here under these conditions.
