This year was the eighteenth annual TART tournament. Ken Corday has been hosting the tournament since its beginning. Five boats including the Ihu Nui, Chiripa, Humdinger, Pacific Blue and the Northern Lights competed for five days to accumulate the most points for catching blue marlin. Every fish tagged is worth points, and a fish over three hundred pounds can be boated for extra points. Five anglers, including Ken, also compete for points and the overall total score for the week. Each angler fishes one day on their designated boat and switches boats throughout the week. On day one we opened up the lead by catching Ken the first blue of the tournament. He also released a shortnose spearfish but unfortunately only blue marlin count for points.
On day two we tagged a pair of blues to maintain our lead over our competitors. Only the Pacific Blue and Chiripa had tagged a fish to this point but with competion as strong as these four boats we knew we had to keep our streak going. On day three after missing a blue in the morning we continued trolling an area that had been producing well for us in the begining of the week. A nice fish piled on our long corner Polukai tube only to finally get stuck on our short rigger bait. We knew the fish was close to the four hundred pound range and after making the call to take her she ended up making the mark and weighing in at 425 pounds. Though we knew we had a substantial lead over the field and our closest competitor had only tagged one blue for the week, Kona is still a place where anything can happen. While making our first tack down to our productive zone on day four we raised two blues withen five minutes of each other and finally managed to get the second of the two stuck. As the fish grey hounded away from the boat it looked close to the kill mark. Our angler this day was a first time marlin fisherman but did a fantastic job keeping up with the blistering airiel antics of the blue. After Tracy had settled the marlin down at the side of the boat we opted to release her though she would have easily reached the 300 pound mark. Instead of taking the extra points for the kill we hoped our lead could carry us through the last day of the tournament.
We ended the last day by tagging two more blues bringing our total for the week to seven including the 425 we boated and the estimated 350 that we released for the sake of conservation. Winning the TART tounament is probably one of the most prestigeous wins a Kona captain can hope for in their career and winning the top mate award is an achievement any long time kona deckhand wants to have on their resume. This win topped off our 2008 season and made it a year to remember.
(Originally posted on September 12, 2008)