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The IGFA Great Marlin Race is off to a fantastic start in 2025. With 2024 producing some of the best billfish results ever collected, where multiple tagged marlin crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific, the program’s first tag to pop up in 2025 followed that same trend. This satellite tag was sponsored by Mike Walsh during the Custom Shootout in the Bahamas, and then later deployed off Bermuda on July 16th, 2024 during the Bermuda Triple Crown. This fish was caught by Laura Russell and tagged by Camron Walsh aboard the De-bait-able captained by KJ Zeher.
After a full 180-day deployment duration attached to a 180lb blue marlin, the tag popped up 2,829nm from where it was deployed after traveling an estimated 6,797nm. This blue followed a similar pattern for tagged blue marlin leaving Bermuda following the Bermuda Triple Crown where the fish traveled north within about 100nm from the edge of the Grand Banks, before heading southeast toward the west coast of Africa. Once the fish reached the coast of Senegal it turned north before heading out to Cape Verde and returning south before popping up.
These results show the expansive nature of blue marlin migrations and reveal the vulnerability of the species to open ocean fishing, as this fish crossed a gauntlet of hooks to reach its destination off Africa. Each piece of information the IGFA Great Marlin Race collects add to our collective knowledge of the species and goes into Stanford’s database of nearly 700 satellite tag deployments that is made freely available to the scientific community.
The IGFA would like to thank Mike Walsh and those who support the IGFA Great Marlin Race for their commitment to learning more about billfish and supporting our efforts to conserve and properly manage billfish species across the world’s oceans.
