THE Great Marlin Race is an international tag and release gamefishing tournament dedicated to billfish research and conservation.
For this year’s event game anglers from around the world descended on Kona, Hawaii. Nautilus Marine, major sponsors of Australia’s Interclub gamefishing tournament at Port Stephens, was also prominent on the Great Marlin Race’s sponsors list as the event helped commemorate the 50th Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament (HIBT).
Ian Frith, Chairman of Nautilus Marine, fishing on board The Northern Lights caught an 800 pound Pacific blue marlin, the biggest ever tagged in the history of the Great Marlin Race.
“We are very proud to be involved with the Great Marlin Race,” said Lyndon Turner, CEO of Nautilus Marine. “It’s a unique competition that combines the thrill of a world class game tournament with the real benefits of essential research into these magnificent creatures of the ocean.”
The winner of the Great Marlin Race is yet to be decided; with the use of electronic tags to follow the movements of marlin, the winner is determined after 120 days when the tags pop off the marlin and float to the surface, transmitting data back to the laboratory. The tags record where the marlin have travelled, how deep they dive and the water temperatures encountered.
The winner of the Great Marlin Race is the marlin that has travelled the furthest.
From the nine tags deployed in 2010, the tags demonstrated a broad range of migratory paths with the winning marlin travelling 2,282 nautical miles. Some tags were found across the equatorial region, which is very unusual for these fish to migrate across, due to the combination of high-temperature surface water and oxygen-poor water below.
The Great Marlin Race is part of the longer-term tagging program Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators (GTOPP), a multi-disciplinary research initiative to study the migratory behaviour of different kinds or sea animals.
