more dense the pack at the right end of the line became. Boats slid up to the line, and then were forced to fall back to keep from going over, others edging into their spot as they gave way. We idled near the line on the extreme right, ironically surrounded by Cabos large and small (Your correspondent is, after all, a Cabo captain.), including a 50 foot semi-custom Cabo Express just a few yards away on the port side that Chris said was very fast.At three minutes out, Maria put Ride of the Valkyries on the sound system and maxed out the volume. At one minute to go, a nearby boat added the "Charge' bugle call to the cacophony. From the cockpit, I saw Jeff on the bridge raise his left hand, fingers splayed, counting off the last five seconds. Mary, facing aft in the mate's chair, feet on the rail, smiled down and gave me a thumb's up. I saw Jeff push the throttles to the pins and felt the boat surge ahead before I heard the shot from the start boat and saw the red flare arc through the sky. Then all hell broke loose.
Tightly packed boats jumping up on plane rocked in each others wakes, slewed too close to one another, fell away, and then were pushed back
together by the wakes of bigger, faster boats passing them. The Carpe Diem cruises at about 24 knots, and its top speed probably is close to 27, which is plenty good enough, but it was by no means the fleetest in this fleet. The big Cabo Express to port blew our doors off, pulling away like we were dragging our anchor. To starboard, first one custom built Carolina boat, then another, streaked by us as a third bore down astern in the flat, center portion of our wake. These few moments of barely controlled chaos etched another indelible fishing memory into my brain. And as for the Ride of the Valkyries, still booming over our cockpit speakers as the boats around us fanned out, I have smelled napalm in the morning like Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and I have smelled marine diesel smoke in the morning like most of you, and I much prefer the latter.The seas on Day 2 were the best of the tournament - big, well spaced swells with little chop. But the fishing continued to be slow, probably a legacy of Tropical Storm Rick. A measure of how slow the fishing was is that we began the day in second place in the Catch and Release calcutta with one blue marlin release (having released the second qualifying marlin on Day 1) and remained there all day as other boats caught and released fish, but none more than one. And no one caught a fish large enough to weigh.
On our run out, we saw a large sea turtle, not remarkable in itself, but a harbinger of things to come. At about mid-day, we came upon acres of dolph
in, including spinner dolphins, with which I was not familiar. Spinner dolphin are small, and their dorsal fins lean forward instead of aft. This peculiarity ostensibly gives them 5he ability to spin on a dime when chasing prey, at least according to Chris, hence their names.In the environs of Cabo San Lucas the presence of dolphin also sometimes seems to be associated with the presence of tuna, although this is certainly not the case with dolphin in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. I say this because in response to our dolphin encounter we brought in all the trolling rods, and ran to get ahead of the traveling schools. There were so many dolphin that I was reminded of Santiago's dolphin dream in The Old Man and the Sea. Once we were ahead of them, the boat slowed and Chris began to throw live sardines (Remember the pangas ghosting about the marina in the pre-dawn darkness selling sardines?) out behind the boat
like confetti in copious quantities while George and I trolled little feathers on bait rods, our mission being to catch tuna for live baiting. Before I could begin to doubt that this could possibly work, we were both hooked up, and, in a trice, two eight to ten pound yellowfins were in the tuna tubes, and the boat was again up and running toward the edge of the Jaime Bank just a few miles away.When Jeff pulled back the throttles, Chris and Yogi went immediately to work bridling the tunas. Chris held the leader and hook, with the rigging floss already clove hitched to the hook. Yogi held the tuna upside down in his left arm like a football to calm it, and passed the rigging needle with the floss loop through the tuna's eye sockets over his eyes, dropped the loop over the hook, wound the hook snug, tucked the hook back underneath the floss to prevent it from unwinding, and each tuna was in the water before he knew he had been out of the water.
We fished the two tuna way long from the outriggers on 130s in the arms of the fighting chair. Jeff bumped the boat along, slow trolling. The tuna were generally well behaved, but now and again one or both would swim the wrong way, and we would have to switch the rods. Yogi could see them going awry before they tangled, a visual skill far exceeding the capabilities of my own parlous eyesight, as the lines in the water looked exactly the same to me when Yogi was satisfied as they did when he was muttering to himself in Spanish and commanding the rearrangement of the rods in Spanglish.
At one point, Yogi was gently hand lining in one of the tuna to check his vital signs, when we had another Sea World visitation. He began to say, "Seeel! Seeel!" and hand line faster.
Jeff shouted "Hurry, Yogi, hurry!" from the bridge, and I saw Mary stand up and stare down into the water behind the boat.
I looked inquiringly at Chris. "What?"
"Seal."
"Seal?"
"Yes, seal." He pointed down.
And sure enough, a very big seal was racing up out of the cobalt blue depths of the Pacific in pursuit of our tuna, which was saved by Yogi in the nick of time, who stashed it in the tuna tube, and then similarly rescued the other tuna. We moved the boat some distance to elude our whiskered nemesis, and resumed live baiting.
But to no avail. So, after a couple of hours, we reverted to trolling. There still were no marlin, but there were more wonders to behold, such as a large pod of pilot whales. I have seen pilot whales before, but infrequently, and singly or in pairs. This was, to quote my Gunnery Sergeant, a shit pot full of'em, frolicking, paralleling the boat, and generally enlivening a dull afternoon.
And the whales had no sooner departed than a large hammerhead shark, maybe eight feet long, appeared and leisurely circled the boat, cocking one eye or the other at each of us in turn, presumably waiting for someone to fall out of the cockpit or off the bridge. This was another irony, because I am not only the captain of a Cabo, but the captain of a Cabo named Hammerhead. Surely this was an omen of good things to come.
Well, to quote my two year old grand daughter, Daisy, "No way, Poopy Head." There would be no brass ring for the Bisbee Bunch this day.
At around 4 PM, an hour before lines out, we did, however, have a major knock down on the left short. Chris suddenly yelled, "Billfish! Billfish! Left short!" I turned too late to see the fish, but I saw the boil in the water and heard the rubber band on the tag line go, or at least I think I did, which is almost the same thing as actually hearing it, at least when I am telling the story. Line sang off the reel, but in the few seconds it took Roy to get to the rod, it stopped. The fish had not hooked up. Chris and Yogi said the marlin came in wagging her bill, which was as big as a man's arm, before slapping the lure off the tag line. They estimated she weighed 400 pounds or more. when we checked the lure. the leader was badly scuffed for three to four feet above the hook. Maybe the marlin bill wrapped when she missed the lure, turned away, pulled some drag, and then came unwound. The eyewitness testimony and the physical evidence on the leader supported this hypothesis and provided a plan for the last, abbreviated day of the tournament.
This knockdown had come on the south end of the Jaime Bank within a mile or two of where we had caught both the striper and the blue the day before. We would come back tomorrow and collect this Mexican marlin, or another like it, and our $500,000 in Aztec gold.
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