As hurricane Dora made its way past the Baja peninsula, with little to no effect on the East Cape (some wind and high seas), the focus this week was on the 2011 East Cape Bisbee Marlin tournament.

And wouldn’t you know that our very own Chucky Van Wormer and his fishing partner Kiko Vega took the first day lead with a 557lb. blue marlin. Chucky and Kiko were fishing with La Hielera and Captain David Lewis out of Hotel Palmas De Cortez. As day two ended, not a single marlin was weighed and the team of Van Wormer and Vega still had the largest marlin.

As the third and final day came to an end things were looking good for La Hielera, but word began to spread at around 4:00pm that there was a boat still out that was hooked up to a big marlin. Van Wormer and Vega would have to wait it out until the last fish was weighed. At approximately 6:00pm the last marlin came to the scale and it would weigh just over 200lbs. The team of Van Wormer and Vega would take the over all tournament. The only thing left was to see how much they would take home in prize money. It is estimated that the team will walk away with close to $200,000.

The Bisbee Catch Stats showed that 62 boats participated in this year tournament and in the three day’s of fishing, 103 billfish were landed (1 black, 38 blues, 39 Striped, and 25 sails). There were also 5 tuna and 8 dorado weighed in the tournament. The largest tuna weighed in at 56.2lbs. and the largest dorado at 47.2lbs.

For the rest of us who didn’t participate in this years Bisbee tournament, the fishing was outstanding this week.

We are still seeing good numbers on dorado and tuna with the biggest tuna reported at Palmas De Cortez weighing in at approximately 100lbs. We are also seeing good numbers on blue marlin, striped marlin and sails. Other species landed this week include roosters, pompano, cabrilla, amberjack, jack cravalle, lady fish and wahoo.