Tournament Rules and Opinions: Everyone's Got Them

 

As I recently wrote for In The Bite Magazine, there has been talk of separate lure fishing side pots in a few of the Gulf of Mexico blue marlin tournaments. Some fishermen have even suggested eliminating live bait fishing completely. I'm all for adding "Lure Only" categories to increase participation, as long as we don't start trying to eliminate live bait fishing altogether.

 

I agree that live baiting targets the big females, but isn't that kinda the point when fishing big money tournaments? The number of blue marlin harvested in the few Gulf tournaments is insignificant to those killed commercially and nowhere near the allowed quota on marlin for U.S. recreational fishermen. Circle hooks have dramatically increased the survival rate on all billfish which refutes the argument that live baiting produces a higher mortality rate than lure fishing. While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, I believe that tournaments in the Gulf of Mexico are doing their best to keep everyone happy while supporting local communities. By splitting the monies between release and weighed pots, everyone can participate in whatever manner they wish to fish.

For this month's column, I asked longtime Club supporter Tom Hilton to provide some information on a new feature he has coming out this month, check it out......thanks Tom!

Here are some screen shots of our new Tournament Analysis feature, launching on May 7th which is the 15th anniversary of the launch of Realtime-Navigator!   This will be made available to Hilton's subscribers at an additional cost of $100/year.

The concept is to provide an electronic logbook format for fishermen to look at the past in order to learn where to go tomorrow based on known fish catch locations.  Some of the more successful captains on the tournament trail have been doing this for years, printing out the various Hilton's imageries then writing on them to show the fish catch locations for that particular day - I see these guys doing their homework and how it has paid off for them.  I will try to provide what I can in terms of showing where fish were caught on which tournament days relative to the dynamic images for that particular day; but fishermen can place their own fish catch locations based on their knowledge of where the fish were caught, which will invariably be much more than I will know.

Below in the first picture are the Texas tournaments I will be including in this year's analysis - let's say you are fishing the Lone Star Shootout - you can click on the 2018 Shootout button, and it will pull up Hilton's as normal, but the images are ONLY from the fishing days from last year's tournament.  Fish catch location icons are only good for that particular day, and will be shown on the sea temps, chlorophyll, altimetry, currents, and salinity images so that you can look for trends each day.  Then look at today's images right before this year's tournament and look for similar trends to determine which way to go.  Subscribers could also look at the previous week's Poco Bueno results/images to get a more timely representation of the conditions/fish catch locations in order to further increase their confidence on where to target during the 2019 Shootout.

Subscribers can also create their own electronic logs of past fishing days to record their results for future reference - it will hopefully be a great learning tool for all of us!