Bear with us! There is just another few days left of marlin mania and then the fishing season will return to something more mundane but of far more use to most anglers. Marlin may provide excitement for some and employment for others but, at the end of the day, most Bermuda anglers want a piece of fish to take home to eat or to stockpile some in their freezers for those plentiful days when it is nigh on impossible to get offshore.

The 10th annual Bermuda Big Game Classic came to an exciting end with a total of 86 billfish being caught of which 66 were blues. The rest were white marlin.

There were four fish killed: two on the first day and two on the last day. Visiting boat Mama Who's 691-pound blue marlin bettered Blue Chip's 560-pound blue to win the daily jackpot on Thursday. On Sunday, one undersized fish was brought in because it came to the boat dead and the boat in question was a local commercial boat for which marlin has a use as valuable bait. Although the other fish was of eligible size, the irony of it all was that the team that caught it had not entered the daily jackpot and so the whole three dailies monies went to Mama Who which also collected the largest blue marlin jackpot. Not a bad three day's effort.

Despite that excitement it was Captain Dave Morris Weez In The Keys that took top honours with a total of 2,600 points from three white marlin releases and four blue marlin releases.

Top Angler was John Monti from Ovation with 2,000 points from four blue marlin releases ahead of Rob Ruwitch with 1,700 points on Weez In The Keys. The largest game fish award (non-billfish) went to visiting boat Ms. Knox with a nice 110.7 pound yellowfin tuna. The Manufacturer's Cup went to Merritt's Weez In The Keys.

The 37th annual Sea Horse Anglers Club Billfish Tournament drew 28 team entries, up from last year and involving 265 anglers. The event got off to a slower than expected start with just six fish being caught on the morning of the first day. Naturally, this was certainly no cause for concern as the bite often changes radically from day to day and with the moon waxing, very prognostication was for improvement over the three days.

Quite apart from the single event being fished there is the outcome of the Bermuda Triple Crown yet to be decided. This overall award is based on the total performance of the participants in the three July billfish tournaments: the Blast, Big Game Classic and Sea Horse events. With plenty of time to go in the final event, the lead was held by Weez In The Keys with 4,000 points, hotly pursued by Que Mas with 3,900 points.

Bright moons, especially the full, are favoured in many places for the hottest of marlin fishing. In particular, the U.S. Virgin Islands actually base their marlin tournaments around the July and August moons, fishing three days before and one day after. That is not to say that marlin aren't caught in between but it does say a lot for what the local skippers feel is peak time. In Bermuda, the jury is still out when it comes to moon phases. The generally agreed feeling is larger fish earlier June/July then the average dropping off as August progresses with better numbers of smaller fish (possibly a run of males) on into September by which point the emphasis has almost totally shifted to wahoo as the autumn approaches.

Just to show that the fish don't pay much attention to the tournaments or the moon or anything else was the fact that it was outside any event that Capt. Kevin Winter's Playmate joined the ranks of the famous when they boated a fish on Monday that tipped the scales at 1012 pounds. This is yet another grander caught in Bermuda and helps to bear out the fact that this is a superb marlin hotspot for big fish in the Western Atlantic.

Our location makes us readily accessible to the United States East Coast-based boats with the owners, guests and other crews able to fly in from just about anywhere in just a couple of hours, making weekends and holidays realistic propositions.

As always at this time of the year, there are some heartbreak stories.

This week it was Ovation's turn to evoke the empathy. The story varies according to the source but it goes something like this: Ovation hooks up into a blue (what else - despite the fact that it could be a bluefin or bigeye tuna or a mako, etc.) that proceeds to dump most of a 130-lb rig. The battle goes on for four hours: some say that they actually got two 130-lb test rigs on the fish, and then everything goes wrong as the shark strikes leaving the angler with mere remains. A cleaned-up version of the tale goes that the marlin (yes, it was a blue) was actually foul-hooked which accounts for its enhanced performance and near-dumping and the difficulty in trying to catch it.

What is not questioned is the fact that the fish ended up in the waters on top of the bank where the summertime tigers are nothing short of awesome. Not only are there the dimensions of the city pavement but they have moments of ferocity that can absolutely shred a hooked marlin or tuna. Many a large yellowfin has been lost during August to these sharks and while most marlin avoid their attentions by staying out in the deep off the bank, anything straying into El Tigre's domain is likely to come unstuck.

Those of you planning on some small game fishing, maybe on the crown of the bank for some bumper yellowtails snappers, be warned that there is a good chance that the sharks will be applying a tax to the removal of any fish from their premises. Surprisingly, there haven't been any shark/man-related events out on the Banks but then again, I wouldn't be in a hurry to test out their temperament. Best to stay in the boat; enough things go wrong at sea.

So, just put up with a few more days of the salty stories all concerning marlin. The final weigh-in of the last major event takes place this afternoon at Barr's Bay Park and then everything will be consigned to history.

The focus can then shift to the odd wahoo and a spot of chumming. After all, with the great summer holiday weekend just a little over a week away; there will be more than a few of us hoping for some peaceful, almost tedious, attempts at Tight lines!!!