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Catching Marlin from a Kayak Info/Photos: Jim@kayak4fish.com

So you caught a small-mouth from your sit-on-top. Don’t bother calling Guinness quite yet. Kayak fishers have upped the ante to bigger prey. Topping the list: Marlin, which will give you a ride more exiting than dropping into the hole at Lava, the Grand Canyon’s biggest rapid.

“You basically go for a sleigh ride,” says Ocean Kayak rep Mark Olson, who recently hooked into one with guide Jim Sammons on Baja’s East Cape in the Sea of Cortez. “It pulls your boat all over the place.” Because marlin can tow a kayak so easily, anglers can use lighter tackle and cede less line to the fish, setting the stage for a close-quarters battle. “Seventy five percent of the time the marlin is within 30 feet of the boat,” Sammons says.

While Olson’s 135-lb. catch, nabbed on live mullet, made a recently released DVD entitled [No Bad Days]i that ran on Fox Sport’s [Inside Sport Fishing]i, his wasn’t the first monolithic marlin caught from a kayak. Ever since he fought a 200-pounder off La Jolla in 1998, San Diego's Sammons had yearned for another chance at the acrobatic billfish. He got his shot last spring while fishing the East Cape, landing a 140-pound striped marlin. "My heart was pumping and my adrenaline was going crazy," he says. "It was the scariest thing I've ever done, without a doubt."

Sammons believes he is the second person to hook, fight and land a marlin from a kayak. Christian Pike of Mission Viejo, Calif., reportedly caught and released a 180-lb. striped marlin while fishing out of Baja’s Rancho Leonero resort in October 2003. And Jon Schwartz, an elementary school teacher from Carlsbad, landed a 200-pound blue off the East Cape in August 2003 after it died during the fight. Purists—including Schwartz himself--don’t consider Schwartz’s marlin a true kayak catch, because he slipped into his kayak to battle the billfish after hooking it from a motorized panga.]i By Sammons’ count, only five people have landed marlin from a kayak.

Sammons, who runs the Kayak4Fish guide service in La Jolla, Calif., first entered the big fish game in August 1998, fighting a two-and-a-half-hour battle with a marlin that towed his sit-on-top seven miles offshore. Sammons managed to bring the big billfish alongside his kayak, but elected to break the line rather than bring it aboard. “I didn’t know how to land it,” he says. “I’d never been on a marlin before.”

His next battle, off the East Cape last May, also lasted two and one-half hours, but was far more dangerous than the first. “It jumped on the bait and ran straight up my line. By the time I set the hook it was 10 feet away—and those things have a three-foot spear sticking out of their faces,” he says, adding that the marlin jumped nearly 40 times before settling into a duel of straight up-and-down grinding. “It looked like it was going to jump right at the kayak at one point, so I put the rod tip into the water, and it went under my boat. It was pretty sketchy."

Thresher Mania Photo from Morton.

In Hemingway’s epic fishing story The Old Man and the Sea, the unlucky Santiago battles a giant marlin from a small boat for three days and two nights, only to have his catch devoured by sharks.

But that’s a fictional story set in Cuba. In the real-life waters off southern California, it’s the men in small boats who have the upper hand, and sharks—specifically thresher sharks—whose story ends badly.

“They jump clear out of the water. It’s even more of an acrobatic show than a marlin,” says Jason Morton, who estimates he lands a dozen of the odd-shaped sharks each season. Evolution has blessed the thresher with a devastating weapon—a tail as long as its body, which the shark uses to stun or kill its quarry and to make long powerful runs with kayaks in tow. Fishermen often hook into these beasts tail first, when the shark slaps the lure. Anglers who prefer an athletic fight use live bait—mackerel is a favorite—which improves the odds of mouth-hooking the shark.

Inside Sport Fishing captured a thresher battle on video last year. Their “Fishing for Threshers, ‘Yak Style” is already a cult classic among kayak anglers.

Threshers typically run twice a year in Southern California waters, for about a week in the spring and again in the fall. Landing an ornery shark from a kayak can be challenging to the uninitiated, not to mention dangerous. Morton recommends would-be shark hunters hire a guide, but that doesn’t mean a kayak isn’t the right tool.

“You can use lighter tackle, because the kayak works as a secondary drag. You don’t reel in the fish—you reel yourself to the fish,” says Morton, who landed a 235-pound thresher on 20-pound test line. (A fish that big isn’t a lot different from a typical 100-pound thresher, he says. “The main difference is another two hours of the same fresh fight.”) That makes for a close-quarters battle. “It’ll get in close to the kayak, and the water makes everything look bigger. When you see that big ol’ shark sitting down there it can get pretty intimidating.”

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