After a few weeks away up north catching Barramundi and having withdrawal symptoms of catching real fish Mike gave us a call to see if we wanted to chase some tuna on Sunday off Sydney. The weather looked good so we met at the boat about 9am for a late start. We caught some livebait and headed for Browns pausing at the 12 mile to set the lures for the rest of the trip. We got to Browns and headed south east where we came across Marquis who had earlier lost a good fish and heard on the radio that Carnage had two Bluefin on board around the 70kg mark but apart from that it was very quiet. We turned and headed north as the current was running uphill and were going to have a cube just north of browns. As we ran over the northern corner of browns heading west we came across some really good looking water and with a crack the left rigger with a jethead on went off followed by a good run. Ruppo grabbed the rod as we cleared the deck, the fish was deep & just swimming with us and wasn’t putting up any fight, there were calls of Albacore & Striped tuna but after 5 minutes he decided to run high in the water off the port side followed by a series jumps.. to our amazement we had hooked a striped marlin of around 85kg in the middle of winter.


We had the fish to the boat in about 10 minutes for a tag shot but was just out of reach as he fully lit up and dived straight down peeling off around 200 metres of 24kg in no time.



As Ruppo was working hard with the lever on sunset he told us that he had never caught a marlin before and this little bloke was really going hard and not giving in. After 50 minutes and some great driving by Mike to get the fish back up and we had him at the back swimming nicely for a tag shot.





Stevo didn't miss with the tag shot and with the tag in grabbed the leader for a quick wrestle as Ruppo took a breather.
It was high fives all around as we congratulated Ruppo on his first marlin and we celebrated with a cold beer and another great day aboard Reef Magic.