When it comes to the world’s top billfish destinations, the Oregon Coast doesn’t even warrant a mention. Species like sailfish and marlin, associated with warmer waters and tropical locales, are so rarely caught in this part of the Pacific Ocean that the state doesn’t maintain any records or fisheries data for them. So, when a group of anglers fishing out of Garibaldi called in on their radio Saturday to let the other boats know they had a giant striped marlin on board, another captain called bullshit.
“It was a pretty busy day of tuna fishing, and there are always captains checking in just to give each other updates,” says Parker Watkins, one of the four anglers who landed the incredibly unusual marlin over the weekend. “And so my dad got on the radio and was like, ‘Hey, this is Afishionato, and we just put a 9-and-a-half-foot marlin on the bottom of the boat.’
“And this guy responded, ‘Yeah, right. I’d like to see pictures of that,’” Parker continues. “And then, finally, another captain said, ‘Wait. Are you guys serious?’”
Speaking with Outdoor Life a few days after the amazing catch, Parker says his crew got plenty of photos and video of the fish that drew a crowd in Garibaldi on Aug. 30. Their striped marlin measured 9 foot 2 inches long, and weighed 160.5 pounds on a certified scale.
While still extremely rare in that area, Parker explains that catching billfish in the Pacific Northwest isn’t totally unheard of. The phenomenon seems to happen every year around this time, as warm ocean currents push northward in the Pacific, bringing massive schools of tuna and other migratory fish with them. Parker says there have been a few marlin caught in recent weeks further south along the Oregon coast, but that a marlin hasn’t been weighed at the port of Garibaldi in at least six years.
Fishermen in Washington State will catch a marlin from time to time, and unlike the Oregon Fish and Game Department, the state actually maintains records for striped marlin. The current state record, caught in 2005, weighed 134 pounds.
“It would have been a record had we caught it about 90 or 100 miles up the coast,” says Parker, who’s caught striped marlin off the coast of Mexico before, but none of this caliber. “I would say that every year or two you hear of them being caught [up here], but what makes this one crazy is the sheer size of it, right? Most of them are around six feet, maybe a seven-footer, but not nine-plus feet.”
As a bonus, the crew caught the fish on the maiden voyage of their new boat, the Afishionado. Parker’s dad, Kevin Watkins, is the owner and captain of the 27-foot boat, and he went out Aug. 30 with his two sons, Parker and Preston, and their longtime fishing buddy, Brett Stone.
The group was trolling for tuna that day, and Parker says they got into fish as soon as they found a good temperature break roughly 50 miles offshore, where the water color changed from a cloudy green to blue. They were catching albacore as fast as they could get their lines out, and their original plan was to see how many fish they could put in the hold of their new boat. But that all changed when Parker saw a huge fish tracking one of the lures in their spread, its fin sticking out of the water. The fish charged the lure but missed it.
“Then we see this same fin coming back, and he looks like he’s out for vengeance,” Parker recalls. “He was just screaming across the water toward the [lure] we had skipping behind the boat.”
Parker was the first one on the rod, which was meant for smaller tuna and way under-gunned for the huge billfish they had on the end of the line. With only around 1,100 feet of braided mainline, and the marlin making 700-foot runs, they had to fire up the motor and chase the fish just to keep from getting spooled. Parker says this went on for more than an hour, and they kept driving the boat in wide circles to keep up with the marlin. By the end of the battle, they’d covered two to three miles of ocean, and everyone on board had taken a turn on the rod.
“I battled it for quite a while, and at first, I wanted to do it all by myself,” Parker says. “But then, once I realized this was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime fish, I was thinking we all needed to touch this rod — this needed to be everyone’s catch. Because none of us are going to get the opportunity to catch a marlin off the Oregon Coast again.”
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