Overboard Boater

I read this article in today’s New York Times talking about Virgin Mobile’s new MiFi card, which provides you with a personal wireless hotspot, and immediately thought, how great for your boat?

It’s about the size of a credit card so you can take it with you, and not worry about a separate internet connection for your boat at the marina.

The Virgin Mobile MiFi

It has its limitations (the range of the Sprint network), and most cell phone networks lose a signal a few miles offshore, unless you pay for and install a signal booster. Satellite is still the best bet for long distance cruising, but as far as logging on at the dock, it looks to be a cool little device.

Name this dive boat for Dive Bimini at the new Bimini Big Game Club.

The reopened Bimini Big Game Club needs a name for its new dive boat, and is holding a naming contest: Winner gets a free dive trip.

The Big Game Club, opened this spring as a Guy Harvey Outpost Resort, features eco-friendly fishing and diving packages. The diving part comes through a collaboration between Harvey and Neal Watson, and will be operated under the name Neal Watson’s Dive Bimini.

Here’s the gist of it:

First, send your suggested names by posting it to  Biggameclubbimini.com (deadline is October 1, 2010). Send as many as you can think of. There are no rules on the names submitted, although the Guy Harvey Outpost team is going to favor ones that are clever, entertaining, easy to pronounce and not too long.

Then a group of at Guy Harvey Outpost, including Guy and Neal, will rally up and review the “keepers”, from which they will create a shortlist of four names.  These four names will then be posted to our Guy Harvey and Outpost Facebook pages and be put to a vote by our fans.

The name with the most votes wins and becomes the new name of our dive boat. And in addition to receiving a personal “high five” letter of thanks from Guy and Neal, the winner will receive a complimentary 2 night stay at the resort and include a two tank dive on “their” dive boat.

Just got this notice in from ACR Electronics:

To read the full announcement, click here for the PDF: Marine Safety Alert

Here’s the map of the affected area:

iPhone camera shots.

This is the first in a series of quick interviews with fishing guides, and why they fish the boats they do. Eric Wallace is a fly fishing guide from Maine who specializes in sight fishing to striped bass in clear, shallow water.

Eric Wallace has been guiding for striped bass in Maine for 11 years, and essentially pioneered sight casting to big stripers on the local sand flats. He needs a boat that is easy to pole, tracks straight, balances well, and doesn’t spook fish with hull slap. This year he got a new technical poling skiff, an Inshore Powerboats 16.

“I was looking around for a small light skiff that is comfortable to pole,” said Wallace. “The original reason I picked it was for the price, under ten grand with a two stroke and a poling platform, a pushpole, and a trailer. By the time I got it where I wanted it, it was well above that.”

Eric’s boat is simple, with few  amenities. It weighs about 500-pounds with his tiller-steered 40-hp Suzuki. One change he’d advocate with the four-stroke is to put the gas tank forward towards the bow to even out the extra weight. Another is to make sure the poling platform mounts have backing plates.

His opinion so far? “It’s not designed for big water, but as a poling skiff it’s a wonderful little boat,” said Wallace. “I wanted something able to float in six inches of water and that I could pole through current from a nine-foot tide change.”

Contact Eric Wallace at Coastal Fly Anger dot com.

photo © jon schwartz

I got an email update from Jon Schwartz, the photographer who snapped a blue marlin as it rammed the press boat at the Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament in Kona.

He typed a short message: “Pete, the story gets better.”

He and the other media types on the press boat took part in a battle to tag and release a 700-pound blue marlin. I don’t know how the rest of the tournament went, but this has to rank as maybe the all-time most awesome press boat ever to be aboard.

The decline in the Atlantic menhaden population over the past few decades is staggering: An 88 percent drop in numbers between 1979 and 2009. The population that once measured close to 200 billion is down to less than 200 billion. The fish that some believe to be the most important in the sea is on the verge of collapse. The main culprit? Commercial harvesting.

Recreational anglers up and down the Atlantic seaboard have noticed the increased absence of this essential cog in the food chain. The groups that represent those anglers are joining together to do something about it. A total of 34 organizations, from local chapters of the Coastal Conservation Association to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to Bass Pro Shops–click here for the full list–have signed on to form a grass-roots conservation campaign called The Menhaden Coalition.

Jerry Benson, the Vice President of CCA Virginia, is one of main people responsible for organizing this coalition. His home State still allows commercial harvest of menhaden for reduction in the Chesapeake Bay–the main nursery for striped bass–to the tune of 240 million pounds a year. Where does the commercial harvest go? Into Omega-3 protein for fish oil capsules, and into farmed fish and livestock feed. And fertilizer.

Benson has been fighting to get Virginia to change its menhaden management policies, and hopes this coalition–formed in January 2010–will have an impact up and down the coast.

“We have organizations from New Jersey to North Carolina involved,” he said over the phone. The ultimate goal is to work with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to set restrictions of commercial menhaden harvesting to more sustainable levels to allow the population to recover.

We hope they can make an impact. Otherwise, this graph will continue its downward slope.

©John Schwartz, A Kona Blue.

Professional photographer Jon Schwartz was biding his time on the press boat during the Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament, when something wild happened. The crew of the 36 Hatteras Chiripa, the designated press boat, set out two lines hoping to catch a tuna or mahi while waiting for the tournament boats to hook up. Then a blue marlin hit one of their lines, and charged the boat.

“I was totally stoked,” said Schwartz, “this is what I’m always thinking about.” He grabbed his camera and started shooting as the fish went ballistic. Ironically, he’d rented a high powered fixed lens to shoot boat-to-boat, leaving him scrambling to take close-ups. “This fish was coming right at us,” said Schwartz, “and I was bummed I would lose the shot.” He didn’t.

The picture above is just a sample of some of the marlin shots he got before the fish rammed the boat and swam underneath. Schwartz said he got lucky, but it’s the byproduct of putting hundreds of hours on the water. “This can be stultifyingly boring,” he said, of the time outdoor photographers put in.

Getting blue marlin shots are always difficult because they usually hit far behind the boat and do their dance from afar. “It’s like watching a bullfight from a mile away,” said Schwartz. This time it unfolded up close, and though they took a shot to the hullsides and eventually lost the fish, from a photographer’s point of view it’s a once-in-a-lifetime catch.

You can read Jon Schwartz’s account on his personal blog, Bluewater Jon.