Marlin Tracked with Satellites in 14th BIIMT

Event to be Captured by ESPN 2

Kailua-Kona, HI  - Publicly funded wildlife reasearch takes center stage starting mid June in the waters off the Kona Coast. Studying animals that are fairly maverick - to say the least - in what is arguably the most difficult environment on Earth from which to study will  take on the added task of capturing the action on film for international television.

The Maui Jim Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series resumes the tour with the second leg on Hawaii Island. The 14th Annual Big Island Invitational Marlin Tournament kicks off with team registration and an angler/crew briefing on Wednesday June 14. And what a briefing it is expected to be.

Most big game tournament briefings are fairly mundane affairs with the most of the over qualified skippers in the Kona charter fleet paying more attention to the T-shirt girl or the spread of food than to the announcements being made about how to find the start fishing line and what size line they can fish with. They've heard all that a million times before.

A few handfuls of excited new anglers on the tournament scene usually fill in the seats near the stage, along with the more taciturn competitors looking for a competitive edge hidden in the fine print of the rule book.

That is all about to change as the BIIMT launches phase one of "Lure an Angler to Research", the ambitious program being offered by the Hawaii Conservation Association (HCA) in association with the Maui Jim Hawaii Marlin Series, National Marine Fisheries Service, corporate sponsors and the angling public entered in Series tournaments.  All anglers involved, be they neophytes or those with deck shoe moss growing on their toes will have the chance to participate in actual research by applying high tech devices on marlin - and then setting them free into the vastness of the Pacific.

This cutting edge research is being supervised by Dr. Richard Brill, Ph.D. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu. Brill will be working with soon to be Ph.D. Andrew West, a biologist from Australia working on his doctorate in Kona by catching and studying juvenile marlin, with the help of the Hawaii Conservation Association. West will take a short break from catching baby marlin barely 3 inches long to work with adults that can reach sizes nearing 2,000 pounds.

At the 14th BIIMT, Brill and West will be concentrating on finding some strong, healthy marlin between 200 and 300 pounds with the goal of coercing these most dangerous animals with spears on their heads to just please lie still there - just a couple of minutes will do - while they try and attache a tube like device to their back with a hand held dart. From there, provided that they don't have to extract a spear from a chest or a hook from an arm, the team hopes to let the frisky marlin back into the endless blue depths - and put their feet up for about 90 days or so. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Don't believe it. A million things can go wrong.

The little computers on the back of these beasts are contained inside a water and pressure proof housing that looks a bit like a cigar with an egg on the end. Extending from the egg is a spikey antenna. The devices are set to detach themselves from the marlin at pre-set intervals of 90, 120 and 150 days. When they detach themselves they are designed to pop up to the surface of the largest of oceans on the planet, and begin transmitting data to a satellite. A pin in a haystack is easy stuff, compared to this.

Once transmitted to space, the data will then be downloaded to computers in a lab on the mainland. Scientists will then apply complex sets of algorithms to the day light based data. The data will have been archived in the device at sun rise, noon and sunset, every day since the animal was tackled and held down for two minutes by scientists  Brill and West. Mad scientists? You be the judge.

After this whole procedure, the scientists hope to have the actual track that the marlin took after being released, and plan to display these tracks on ESPN 2 and the world wide web for everyone to see. This has never been done in the Pacific, and it has never been done anywhere during a tournament where the marlin might be worth some $200,000.00 in prize money to boot!

Tournament rules in the Big Island Invitational are being altered to raise the minimum size of marlin that can be taken to the dock in an effort to provide HCA with more stable platforms for this research than can be afforded by the small marlin normally released in Hawaii. Of maligned for what has been incorrectly alleged in the press, Hawaii does support tag and release. In fact, Hawaii anglers actually tag and release more billfish than any other Pacific destination, according to the data from the South West Fishery Center at La Jolla, California. HCA officers believe that claim might also extend to every single state in the USA, as well.

HCA and the Maui Jim Series will be establishing "Lure an Angler to Research" and the second phase of the project - "Track a Marlin" - as a year round program. The Maui Jim Series events will provide the large, organized field of boats needed to catch the number of fish required to find the best specimens from May through Decemeber. During the non tournament season, HCA shall be working with other organizations such as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is interested to release some marlin from their Pacific atoll wildlife preserves.

The Big Island Invitational is the longest running major jackpot tournament in Kona, and has produced the richest purse in all of Hawaii just about every year since it was founded in 1987.  To keep the level of competition in the BIIMT at the very highest peak, organizers encourage anglers from all over the globe to come to Kona and fish with skippers that have earned spots on the invitation list by doing one not so simple thing - producing marlin.

The Maui Jim Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series hopes to up the standard of marlin tournaments the world over by setting the pace of the race to include meaningful research. Anybody can throw parties and catch fish, and most of the compeitions around the world raise considerable sums of money for an array of charitable organizations. However, there is just about as much scienctific information on hand regarding marlin now as there was 10 years ago. Unfortunately, little of the hard work that has been performed on marlin has had any tangible affect on the status of the stock of marlin in the ocean.

The new capabilites of todays technology are providing the means to begin compiling the information needed to manage open ocean fish stocks to robust levels, not just levels considered to be "sustainable". Through this partnership of sportsman, science, private funding, corporate sponsorships and government agencies, people in Hawaii are gearing up to head off into the ocean in search of the unknown. Again.

This is what people in Hawaii and Polynesia have been doing for thousands of years. Now the world gets a chance to participate, or stay at home and watch in on cable TV or the world wide web

Check out the Maui Jim Series web site located at konatournaments.com, watch ESPN 2 on  Wednesday July 12 and/or Sunday July 23 - or log on to the HCA web site, hica.org, in mid June to choose your level of participation. To inquire e-mail tropdil@aloha.net, or call HCA at 808-331-1191 and the Maui Jim Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series at 808-327-1440.