REPORTS FROM THE RIP: Hours of boredom, minutes of excitement ( and great blue marlin pics)

Stunning shot of a Blue Marlin with its head out of the water

As any one knows that has fished for Blue Marlin, minutes can turn to hours and days. When fishing for the elusive Blue bomber. Hours and hours of boredom punctuated by brief intense moments of extreme excitement. But by the same token, When you finally encounter one of these majestic fish, your questions as to why you work at this silly sport disappear quickly. There are days that you drag baits and lures for hours with nothing to show for it but salt spray on your boat. Then out of nowhere the call comes out that there is a blue one on the left teaser. Everyone springs from their lazy haze and jumps to attention. When a blue marlin comes racing into the trolling spread behind your boat, Everything goes from boring to one million miles per hour. Then when the fish is hooked and going ballistic behind the boat, the energy level of the fish is transferred directly to everyone in the cockpit. For those of you that have not seen this event, It is a bucket list item. I can't think of to many things that compare to watching a Blue marlin greyhound out of the Aqua blue water as it races line off the reel. There are a few sequence shots in this blog that show a couple marlin from the last week. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as we do. The pics can never capture the moment but Its still exciting to see the pics of a blue marlin jumping out of the water

The Boss harnessed up and doing battle

For the past few days we had the owner of the "Therapy" fishing with us. What a pleasure! He is a truly accomplished angler. When he got on our boat, the first thing he saw was that we had removed our fighting chair. ( ( we use stand up fighting harnesses ) He remarked that it had been a few years since he had used stand up tackle. But He had no problems. He just belied up to the back of the boat and whipped ass on some blues. It was and honor to fish with such a good angler.
The fishing for the past week has been sporadic. Some days they chew and some days they do not. With a few more weeks to fish here this season, I hope we get some more of the good days.
The anual Gringos vs the Dominicans softball game was last Sunday night. Casa De Campo bussed about 18 boat crew members out to LaRomana to the local ball field. The dock attendants from the marina play for a local team and are VERY good. Vilma and Jesmine brought coolers full of adult beverages and we all had a blast. I did not play this year as I am still recovering from last years soft ball injury. I had just as much fun coaching though. As the first fitch was about to be thrown, I decided to set the attitude of the game from the start. I called time out as the other teams pitcher began his wind up. I walked to the umpire with two shots of rum and he gladly obliged. After that he and I would have a shot overtime he called a play in favor of our team Poor guy did not know that I switched mine to Sprite. It was a close game. Much closer than years past. Infact we had a 3 point lead at the end of the game but the Dominican team had runners on base and they jacked a walk off home run. It did not seem to matter though. Both teams gathered around the infield and celebrated as though it was the world series.