The Bisbee’s Black & Blue Marlin Tournament is not for the faint of heart. With an entrance fee of $71,500 for participating in all the jackpots, there is a lot at stake, and this tournament draws only the best in the business. Held yearly the third week of October in Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, this three-day competition, known as ‘the world’s richest billfish tournament’ attracts upwards of 175 teams and this year the prize money was a cool $2.2 million.
In 2014 Dan Lewis, retired president of a global airline consulting firm, and his dedicated crew from Mexico and Hawaii, entered the competition again, as they have done every year since 2000, with Dan’s 63-foot Bertram sport-fishing boat Sporty Game. They were slow trolling large live skipjack and yellow fin tuna behind them when a marlin caught the bait. “We happened to hook the fish in a good spot,” says Dan. “It was pretty easy getting the fish on the boat; it took the crew only 17 minutes. We decided to keep the fish, covered it with a towel to keep it wet, told the organizers that we weren’t going to weigh it until later and kept fishing. They checked with us several times during the day if we were ready to weigh but we wanted to keep going until the end of the day, until 5 pm.”
“As luck would have it we had caught a 337 lbs blue marlin and it turned out we were the only across the board team to have caught a fish that qualified in this particular tournament. Now this doesn’t mean that the other teams aren’t good, believe me they are!” says Dan. “This is the cream of the crop. We just had our day that’s all. About one third of the teams, around 35 teams, entered across the board. These are the pros,” explains Dan. “Ours was not a particularly large fish, there was one other that came in 20 lbs heavier, but it didn’t qualify across the board, and so we got to take home most of the daily money.” Thanks to Dan having entered all the daily levels across the board, this meant they took home a healthy prize sum of $1.682 million.
