Outdoor Notes : Globe-Trotting Black Marlin Goes 5,763 Miles in 613 Days

Two years ago this month, J.P. Carlier, a marlin fisherman from Paris, France, caught a small black marlin on a hotel boat out of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

He didn’t kill the fish. Instead, when the marlin had been brought to the side of the boat, it was socked with a dart, not a gaff. A National Marine Fisheries Service tag, with an identifying four-digit number, was implanted into the muscles of the fish’s shoulders, and released.

Then, 613 days later, a Japanese long-line commercial fishing vessel recaptured the fish northeast of New Zealand, a distance of 5,763 miles south of where Carlier tagged it off the tip of Baja California.

Jim Squire, who directs the NMFS’s billfish tagging program in La Jolla, said it is the longest known migration of a tagged marlin ever recorded in the Pacific or Atlantic. He said the marlin covered an average of 9.4 nautical miles per day. The NMFS provides interested sport fishermen with tagging gear, hoping to learn more about billfish migration patterns.

Arizona’s Game and Fish Commission may soon legalize the crossbow for big game hunting. A proposed change in the state’s hunting regulations would permit crossbows for taking deer, javelina and turkey, so long as the weapons have a minimum draw weight of 125 pounds.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake has risen nine vertical feet in the last three years and ruined most of the lake’s shoreline waterfowl management areas. Repairs will be years in the making, Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources says, and costs will have to be borne at the expense of other wildlife programs.

New legislation permits commercial divers to take abalone in less than 20 feet of water within one mile of the shoreline of the Channel Islands, except in designated reserves.

Previously, divers were limited to a minimum depth of 20 feet. The new law also authorizes the DFG to close any new zone if it determines the abalone is in danger of over-harvest.

Briefly Dr. Donald Siniff of the University of Minnesota won approval by the Fish and Game Commission recently to capture, implant with radio transmitters and release as many as 15 California sea otters in the next 15 months. . . . New Mexico’s Game & Fish Department says 560 extra large rainbow trout--some of them measuring 26 inches--have been stocked in McAllister Lake, in northeast New Mexico. . . . Loyola Marymount University is offering a bass fishing clinic Feb. 4, 11 and 18, with instruction by several bass fishing pros. . . . The Amateur Trapshooting Assn’s Spring Grand American will be held Feb. 5-10 at the Phoenix Trap & Skeet Club.