Marlin fishing

Marlin fishing (also called billfishing) is considered by some game fishermen to be a pinnacle of offshore game fishing, due to the size and power of the four marlin species and their relative rareness. Fishing for marlin captured the imagination of some sport fishermen in the 1930s, when well-known angler/authors Zane Grey, who fished for black, striped, and blue marlin in the Pacific, and Ernest Hemingway, who fished the Florida Keys, Bahamas and Cuba for Atlantic blue marlin and white marlin, wrote extensively about their pursuit and enthused about the sporting qualities of their quarry.

These days a lot of resources are committed to the construction of private and charter billfishing boats to participate in the billfishing tournament circuit. These are expensive purpose-built offshore vessels with powerfully driven deep sea hulls. They are often built to luxury standards and equipped with many technologies to ease the life of the deep sea recreational fisherman, including outriggers, flying bridges and fighting chairs, and state of the art fishfinders and navigation electronics.

Marlin are part of the billfish family, of which 10 species are of the most interest to anglers: Atlantic and Pacific blue marlin, black marlin, white marlin, striped marlin, Atlantic sailfish, Pacific sailfish, longbill spearfish, shortbill spearfish, and swordfish.

The blue marlin of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are more widely pursued by sport fishermen than any other marlin species. Their wide distribution in tropical oceanic waters and seasonally into temperate zones makes them available to many anglers, and their potential to reach great sizes and spectacular fighting ability makes them a highly desired catch to some anglers.

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Wikipedia