The Quest for a Billfish Record

It’s easy to say you’re going to try to break the record for the most billfish caught over the course of a single year, it’s another thing all together to have the fortitude to get it done. Facing a mountain of obstacles, and an extremely high bar set by Brad Phillips on the Decisive, owner Gray Ingram and his team on the 63-foot Ricky Scarborough, Big Oh, endeavored to persevere, putting their heads down and working hard for more than a year to get ready for an attempt at the record. In 2021, the team, led by Capt. Newt Cagle, put together a stellar year, catching 3,146 billfish, fairly close to the 3,671 put up by Phillips; so, they knew the record was within reach if they could only exceed the numbers they put up that year.

Mag Bay Was Key Striped Marlin Fishing

Cagle, who has captained the Big Oh for the last three and half years, says it was during the fall of 2021 when they started thinking about going for the record after a fantastic season in Magdalena Bay, catching a multitude of striped marlin. “We had a really, really, good Mag Bay season and we were sitting around talking about how good the fishing turned out,” says Cagle. “Capt. Jimmy Grant sent me an article from Billfishreport.com on the Temptress and how they caught 1,000 billfish in a year back in 2000, which was a really big deal at the time. That same article also showed Brad Philips’ record for most in one year, which was 3,671. We talked some more and figured that if we could put together another good year, and had another good Mag Bay season, we might be able to break that record.”

Preparing for the Record Attempt

After fishing so hard in 2021, the Big Oh, needed some love before attempting a shot at the record and the hard fishing that it would require. So, on January 22, of 2022, the team, including mates Edward Barr and Sebastian Leon, drove the boat from Cabo all the way back to Wanchese, North Carolina for a major refit. “The boat needed some new motors and all kinds of stuff,” says Cagle. “But that’s when we put together the plan to try to break the record in 2023. We arrived in Wanchese in February, and we rebuilt the whole boat in nine months; the entire team busting their tails with this goal and mission in mind. It’s what kept us going in the boatyard!”

After completing the refit, they shipped the Big Oh back to Cabo and fished a little bit in November and December of 2022, getting things dialed in for their record attempt the following year.  

The Journey Begins: Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

January – Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

For a team that was trying to set a record, they didn’t fish a whole lot during the first month. “We started in Cabo San Lucas, fishing the Finger Bank for striped marlin. We dead bait trolled, which is all we did during the entire year; we don’t even have a live bait pump on this boat,” says Cagle. “We only fished seven days in January, catching 145 striped marlin.”

Challenges in Chiapas, Mexico

February to the First Week of June – Chiapas, Mexico

This is where the story takes a bit of a surprising turn. Even though they were dead set on breaking the record, the team decided to do something completely opposite from their normal routine and set off for Chiapas, Mexico, a town right on the border with Guatemala. “A friend of mine, Mike Day, had a boat down there for 13 years and he caught a lot of fish there,” says Cagle. “It’s a pretty untouched place. It’s super remote; they don’t even have a restaurant that stays open past 4 p.m., but they do have a fuel dock. Although we would normally fish Costa Rica from January through June, we wanted to try something different.”

At first Cagle must have thought he’d made a bad move. For the first four weeks fishing there the water was green and cold, and the lack of boats to communicate with made for a pretty slow start. “That first month was very, very tough,” says Cagle. “We’d never been there before and there were no other boats to talk to. We spent most of our time learning, figuring it out and riding around marking the bottom, learning the depths and finding out where certain things were. The dorados were bad, the bathymetric charts were super inaccurate, but we just stuck it out and kept right on grinding. About the end of March, beginning of April, the water turned blue and the fishing turned on. Since we had a pretty good idea of the bottom after riding around for a month, it got incredible!”

On March 27, Big Oh caught 15 sails and a blue marlin and it never slowed down for the remainder of their 70 days spent fishing off Chiapas. “We were averaging 25 sails a day, with our best day catching 87 and we were the only boat within 130 miles,” says Cagle. “We had six days where we caught over 50 sails. We ended up catching 1,566 in Chiapas with 30 of those being blue marlin. Our last day of fishing there was on June 4, and we caught 18 sails and a blue marlin.”

Cagle says that for the most part they experienced calm weather in Chiapas, but a couple of days a week the Tehuantepec Wind would funnel down through a mountain range and create a short-period, choppy swell that could be tough to deal with.

Fishing Along the Mexican Coast

June, July – Huatulco, Zihuatanejo and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

After the first week of June it was time to start making their way back up the Mexican coast to Cabo, but of course, they decided to make a few stops along the way. The first stop was in Huatulco, and although they had some decent fishing there, it proved to be a logistical nightmare. “Huatulco is super remote,” says Cagle. “We had some decent fishing there, but we had to fuel up from a drum in the back of a truck.”

Their next stop was in Zihuatanejo and from there on to Puerto Vallarta. The team fished El Banco off Puerto Vallarta for four days. “There’s definitely a lot of potential there,” says Cagle. “We caught a black marlin, some blues and more sails. There weren’t any crazy numbers or anything but in those four days we raised that black, 12 blue marlin and one striped marlin. Honestly, it felt like a North Drop type of place where you can get three to five blue marlin bites a day if you have the right water.”

The team got back to Cabo San Lucas at the end of June and fished just the first couple of days in July before starting in on getting the boat ready for the Magdalena Bay season they hoped to kick off at the end of September. After an extended hiatus that lasted most of July and September, they left Cabo on September 29th.

Final Push: Magdalena Bay

October, November and December – Magdalena Bay

Now on the last leg of their quest to set the record, it would all come down to taking advantage of the huge numbers of striped marlin that descend upon Mag Bay during the winter months. A lot of the big numbers of fish that are caught here come from boats pitching live baits into the schools of voracious striped marlin that have balled up bait on the surface. But the Big Oh crew, as mentioned earlier, catch all their fish trolling dead baits. “It’s the only way to fish,” says Cagle. “We used Baitmasters of South Florida medium ballyhoo. Mark Pumo sent us the first 100 cases he processed during the first week of September and we eventually used 120 cases of bait and 10,000 Eagle Claw ELF 2004 circle hooks.”

Just like in Chiapas, however, the fishing started out a little cold, with the team only catching three striped marlin on their first day in Mag Bay. “October 1^st3 was our first day of fishing and it was kind of a slow start, with some banner days thrown in here and there. We ended up riding out a hurricane and we had a lot of bad water move in that covered up the Casa Bank and moved all the way down to the Finger Bank,” says Cagle.

Eventually the water quality improved and the fishing picked up. “We had some really good days on the Finger Bank in October with our best day catching 154 striped marlin. After that we pretty much settled into fishing on the Potato Bank, which is just South of Punta Tasca at the southern end of Mag Bay for 90 percent of our season,” says Cagle.

Big Oh’s best day on the Potato Bank was 101 stripes and a sail in November. The fishing stayed red hot on the Potato all through November and December with the team scoring 83 striped marlin on their best day in December. On their last day of fishing, December 19, 2023, they caught 70 striped marlin, which brought their grand total after 139 days of fishing up to 4,057 billfish, smashing the previous record by 386.

Over 90 percent of those fish were caught by owner/anglers Gray and Camilla Ingram, each exhibiting a tremendous display of angling prowess, dedication and stamina. Fishing in remote destinations with some real logistical challenges, the team put over 2,000 hours on the boat to achieve this lofty goal. Now it’s up to another intrepid team to chase down the incredible year posted by the extremely talented crew on the Big Oh.

Tackle and Techniques