Mike Carney Toyota Townsville Billfish Challenge Day 1 report:

Remember back in the days that Cape Bowling Green was a sailfishery?  (The destination report talks a bit more about that here.) Well yesterday’s results, while certainly not of ‘sailfishery’ level, showed that when the little black marlin are around, you can always count of a few sails at CBG!

In fact yesterday, I almost got to say that no marlin were caught, except that Cool Change snuck one in with the first marlin of the day at 5:04pm which is 4 minutes after cease fishing.  Fortunately hooked up prior to time being called and so their fish will qualify as both the first and last marlin of the day!

Otherwise, by my records, there were 6 other tags – all sails – on what was a relatively quiet day.

The Gough/Davidson/Kane’s Silverback reported the first sail tag of the day at 10:30am and they came in dribs and drabs after that.  The Mathieson’s Kiama was hooked up during the first sked and tagged shortly after.  Also tagging on the middle sked were us on KEKOA, Clippertee, and Tropy in the small boat section.  The O’Brien’s OB1 was unlucky, hooking a double of sails in the micro size range but could not get the tag into either.

On the final sked, last year’s winners on Emma Kate added a tag right at the end also to bring the total to 7.

While the weather was not as good as forecast, it was still a pretty nice day on the water. Here’s hoping day 2 will bring a few more fish. By my count, there are 24 boats competing.

And good luck to all the boat competing in the Light Tackle Slam/AIBT which starts today back up at Cairns.

Photo above: Mike Carney’s sailfish on KEKOA today.