In October of 2010, it looked like it was going to be the start to an epic day. I was fishing with a charter along with my friends John and Michael. We arrived at the buoy line approximately 25 miles southwest of Mazatlan, Mexico. The first mate set our trolling spread of plungers and jets in purple and black and mahi-mahi colors. Within the first five minutes, a nice 200lb blue marlin crashed our teaser in the prop wash off the starboard corner. The little guy had no interest in the rigged mackerel we set back and faded away, but anticipations were high to say the least.
Things calmed down and the adrenalin faded. The starboard rigger snapped and the drag sung on the Penn 50 wide, and a nice 100lb sailfish took to the air. It nailed the purple, black and silver plunger. Ten minutes later the fish was to the boat, a quick photo was snapped, and it was released and swam off strongly.
Now things were cooking. The baits were re-set and not five minutes later, the shotgun line went off. This was no sailfish – a 500lb plus blue marlin took to the air. This fish was a flier. She jumped and put on an aerial display. Unfortunately on her 7th jump, she went right, the blue and silver jet head lure went left, and she came unbuttoned.
These fish were aggressive and chasing bait all over the area. Twenty minutes later, we saw a bill slash again at the teaser. The marlin chased down the black and silver plunger, took one head shake and came free again. Michael was disappointed that he had two fish come off in such a short time, but we were all encouraged because the boat trolling past us just hooked up.
Then it happened – something strange that I couldn’t understand. Not because the captain barked the orders in Spanish, but he had the first mate bring in the whole spread and put out small tuna feathers. He wanted to catch some bait and live bait fish (I later learned that this was his favorite way to fish). It took over an hour to hook and land a bait, then that bait went untouched for 2 hours before it got hit (by the way that marlin got off too).
Over the next 4 hours I had a lot of time to try and figure what we did and why we did it. Why did we change tactics when the fish were biting? The captain got bored, and he didn’t like trolling, even though the fish were interested in our marketing techniques (high speed trolling). My question to you is, have you ever done this in your business? Have you ever ran an advertisement, a marketing campaign, etc… and just got bored and wanted to change up tactics even though you were getting leads? You just may not have been closing them. You had a low conversion rate. Read more…