This year's tournament produced one of the most thrilling competitions ever for this event.  Teams from as far afield as the east Atlantic and Hawaii boated marlin above the qualifying weight, keeping the result in suspense till late in the night Pacific time.

Madeira and the Canaries started the ball rolling early on July 4th, with Madeira weighing two fish to set the target for the rest of the world to beat. Fish seemed to be on the chew everywhere and Bermuda was next in action, with Capt Travis Butters on the Que Mas weighing a big fish at lines out to set the benchmark higher.  On the same day in Bermuda, Capt James Robinson released two blues caught with the aid of some sharp Hays Hooks to take home $49,000 for top release boat in the simultaneous BLAST tournament.

The Bermuda fish looked odds-on favourites to take out the July 4th top spot until late in the Hawaiian afternoon when Capt McGrew Rice on the Ihu Nui found his angler a really nice fish of 773lbs. Despite another boat fighting a similiar sized beast for 11 hours, McGrew and company took home the honours at the end of the day, thus sealing Kona's sixth win in this prestigious tournament.  Congratulations to all involved.

Several of the fish during the day fell to Legends, this one in Madeira ate an 22 series Andromeda aboard the Balancal !

Here's a nice 188lb ahi caught Saturday by Doug Dierenfield, a Kona dentist entered for the Maui Jim Kona Classic aboard Bill Jardine's little boat. A 12/4 Ogre seems to have been its undoing, it ended the tournament top of the leader board for the AHI division ! Congratulations to both angler and captain !

Oliver King caught a fish in Madeira today that Capt Anibal (pictured) aboard the BALANCAL called over 1000lbs.  The fish took 35 mins to land and is the second grander caught in a week in the world famous big fish waters off the island.

As he was doing that, Capt James Robinson was losing one of similiar size in Bermuda. Capt James rang us minutes after losing the fish, saying it was a classic Bermuda giant that ate the same Andromeda that caught his fish the day before.  Alan Card on the CHALLENGER and Allen de Silva both encountered fish today too.

More as it happens.

June 22nd, 2008

Capt James Robinson of WOUND UP CHARTERS showed his newly acquired Andromeda a nice fish in Bermuda yesterday, and his lure's good looking sister aboard another boat caught another fish -  so with tongue in cheek we can say 66% of the blue marlin in Bermuda yesterday were caught on a Legend lure..... with Madeira, Hawaii and Bermuda all firing it's going to be a humdinger of a July 4th World Cup, that's for sure !

photo courtesy of www.woundupbermuda.com 

The bite the past two days in Madeira has been reminiscent of the mid 1990's. REEL TIGHT, a 62 Viking and Peter Bristow's CATHERINE B have been in the thick of the action, both boats recording three bites each yesterday from 600lb plus fish. Today the American boat came good and released a fish they called 1100 - 1200 lbs. Several other fish have been seen and caught the past three days from the seven boats fishing, indicating that a decent patch of fish is in the area. Interestingly, a good by-catch of bull dolphin to 50lbs for the first time in 15 years has also indicated something may be different.

I have a few contacts on the island if anyone wants to see if there's some spare days fishing this season. Drop me an e-mail.

Looking good for July 4th !

• a phone-call from US tackle guru Dennis Braid last week after his recent trip to Vanuatu elicited the news that the fly-fishing speciality crew of Dean Butler and Russ Housby have relented on the softheads and a Krakatoa is finally a regular on the rigger. It seems more and more Pacific crews are making the switch to a this lure as their teaser........
• Italian angler David Viani reports that the Krakatoa was his "gold medal" lure after his June trip to the Cape Verdes, beating out a host of better-known lures to the title
• the Balancal, a 36 Lochin sportfisherman riding the traditional Madeiran big fish grounds reports that her first two fish of the season both ate a Legend Lure
• On the 25th of May, Capt Zac in the Cape Verdes said : ”Hello to all from Mindelo, yesterday was our last day fishing with Karl and Jens from Germany. They fished 6 days, and caught seven blues. Not the best in the world, but also not that bad. The last four fish up to 500lbs, was caught on Andromeda.........[she] is surely one of the best lures for us, and we just got one left ! Roddy will soon send us more. “
• Capt Olaf Grimkowski is also in the Cape Verdes, and he too is having great success with his Legend Lures. Of the fish he has caught so far, over 83% of them have been taken on our lures.
• Matt Watson, of the Ultimate Fishing Show in New Zealand, recently had a blast at the remote Wanganella banks - read what he had to say in the forums.
• Down in central America, Capt Brad Phillips of Guatemala sent us an e-mail last month saying : “The teaser of the month has proved to be the new Legend Lures 'Piper', a new style lure which Roddy Hays gave to me at the Miami boat show, it is a hot little item that the sailfish just can't leave alone”
• La Gomera is finally firing too, over in the Canary Islands off Morocco.  Capt Jason Pipe of the Bocinegro is putting the heat to some nice blue marlin, and his new 22 series Krakatoa caught two nice blue marlin on its first day in the water before being lost in battle before day's end !

More news as it happens !

June 7th, 2008

Following a custom order for Japan, we find ourselves with a limited amount of electric blue shell Andromedas and Basilisks. The Andie is flavour of the summer in the Cape Verdes, and the Basilisk needs no introduction to anyone who has fished the Atlantic islands and seen this super-plunger in action.

Contact Capt Jay at catchemup@charter.net for further details and pricing if you want one of these little beauties !

The Ultimate Fishing Show  -  remember the jet-ski and the striped marlin  ?  Well Matt's done it again! Go and see him as Gannet Man!

 

The Hays's have landed. I now have an address on (or should that be 'in' ?) Jupiter, Florida. I also have a telephone number. There must be a lot more people (and hence cellphones) in America than in New Zealand as the number contains about twenty seven digits. Conversation thus far is centered on how much better equipped cars in the States are compared to the same model in New Zealand (what a surprise) and every living thing that has been spotted so far is either a raccoon or something dangerous. There have been mentions of a foray out into machine-shop land so a resumption of lure production might be on the horizon. I will welcome not having to be one of only two repositories of Legend Lures ready for instant shipping on the planet. There is a third, but it is mid-Pacific and moving at 27 knots, 127 feet above the water with a seagull sitting on it.

A new phase in the evolution of the Legend Lures brand started yesterday when Roddy set off with the Hays family from New Zealand, bound for Florida. Roddy, Susan and the five Hays kinder have been living in Northland New Zealand for just over two years and Kerikeri has been the site of the development of the Quick-Change Pro-Range line of lures that are very different in concept from many traditional game lures. Roddy was able to closely supervise the production of heads and shoulders at a precision machine-shop in town and the area proved to be an ideal base to establish these highly successful lures. From a selfish point of view as his internet supplier, it was very convenient for me to have the R & D as well as the production facility just up the road from Auckland. It was also great having a good mate within close reach. I've spent many a happy weekend at the Hays establishment over the last couple of years. My main regret is that we didn't do nearly enough fishing but instead spent an enormous amount of time plotting and fiddling (or fergling as Roddy would put it) in the shed. I've learnt a lot about lures from Roddy and I'm an altogether more cunning beast for the experience. Sod's law would dictate that despite taking delivery of upwards of three thousand skirts from Kerikeri prior to Roddy's departure, then the first order I received when the Hays's were still in the air was for a skirt I didn't have. C'est la vie.

New Zealand’s legendary status as the striped marlin capital of the world received a serious boost this past month when Kiwi angler Guy Jacobsen, a flooring magnate, put a 105kg fish from the famed Middlesex Bank onto the scales for a potential 1kg line-class world record. As only the third 100:1 fish ever officially recorded, the striped marlin was just one of a string of amazing captures over five days fishing that included two new national NZ records and another world record stripey for his wife, Eryn, who used 4kg line to land a fish of 94kg three days earlier after a 3 hour battle.  Just a day before that Eryn landed an 85.2 kg stripey on the same line class for the NZ record.

To cap off the striped marlin catches, a 174kg blue marlin also hit the scales at the famous Bay of Islands Swordfish Club. It was caught off the North Cape as the boat steamed home and gave Guy a new potential 8kg national record after a two hour fight.

Guy and Eryn’s G&S sportfisherman is called Hookin’ Bull, and is a relatively new arrival on the NZ big-game scene. Captained by the experienced John Batterton (ex-Harlequin), the boat is proving itself an ideal platform for the Jacobsens’ assault on the record books. On deck is the formidable team of Brad Fergus and Rowan White and between them this team put an incredible amount of preparation into their fishing, using mainly pitch-baits on Shimano gear for the light line classes, and trolling several of the new Krakatoa from Legend Lures as their teasers.

We suspect we’ll hear a lot more from this crew as they get to know their new boat even better !