There are two ways to catch a striped marlin off Cabo. One is to troll lures through the blue water and wait for something to happen. The other is to run to the Golden Gate Bank at first light, find the fish on the surface, and throw a live bait at them one at a time. The second way is harder, louder, and the only way our captain, a compact man everyone called Chuy, was willing to fish in late September, when the bait had just shown up on the bank and the marlin were, in his words, lying around on top like tourists.
Golden Gate is a seamount about thirty miles up the Pacific side, and the ride out is the last calm you get. Once the sun is up you are standing on the bow with a live caballito on a circle hook, watching for a tail. A striped marlin tailing looks like a scythe cutting the swell, deliberate and almost lazy, and the trick is to get the bait fifteen feet in front of it without hitting it on the head. I hit two on the head. Chuy said things in Spanish that his mate translated as encouragement.
The third fish turned on the bait as if it had been waiting for it. The line came tight, I let it eat for a three count, and a hundred and twenty pounds of striped marlin went into the air in a lit-up blue and silver blur and stayed there, more or less, for the next quarter hour. It jumped fourteen times. I know because the mate counted, out loud, in a tone of increasing disappointment, as if the fish were underperforming.
Twenty minutes later it was alongside, glowing neon, bill wrapped in the mate’s gloved hand while he pulled the hook and held it in the current until it kicked. It swam off without ceremony. Frigatebirds hung over the bank the entire day, and by noon we had released three and lost two more to my throwing arm.
At the dock, the mate told a man from the next boat we had caught three. The man said he had caught five. Chuy asked how big and the man said, well, average. Chuy nodded and said ours were pequeños too, and that was how I learned that in Cabo the fish get smaller the closer you get to the bar.
Offshore hours are hard on a shirt and harder on skin. See our UPF 50+ fishing shirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.