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Well since the meeting isn't till monday here i am. well patrick to answer your question yes they are promoting catch and release to a point. the rules are as follows. you recieve 100 pts for a sailfish or a spearfish, 200 pts white marlin and 400 pts for a blue marlin. these pts are for released fish only and they give you a disposable instimatic camera to photgraph the released fish and turn it in at the end of each day. the tournament starts out with a minimum lenth ( lower jaw to fork of tail ) 99 inches which is about a 325lb fish. For each fish you boat and weigh you get a 1 pt per pound. if you boat a fish under minimum length you get -400 pts. So it would be better to release a 385 lb fish than get 385 pts for it. I would say that about 90% of the boats fishing these tournaments are out to kill 1000 marlin. I had some friends who were the mates on the hatteras demo boat during the tournament i fished and they were not going to boat a fish it was all release. i guess hatteras doesn't want to get associated with killing marlin but other than that i didn't meet anyone there that was strickly catch and release. By the way the boat that was hooked up on that fish lost it at 715 pm last night which turns out to be a 34 hour fight. That's too bad because rolex sponsors these tournaments and offered 1 million dollars to the team that gets a 1000 lb fish and i heard that the fish was estimated at 1300 lbs. I guess that's why they call it fishing and not catching.
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