The next two months promise to be some of the busiest of the year for The Billfish Foundation as our team travels to industry events, tournaments, and research projects across the country.

We’ll kick things off at ICAST next week before heading to several of the East Coast’s premier billfish tournaments, including Pirate’s Cove Billfish Tournament, the Beach Haven White Marlin Invitational, and the MidAtlantic Tournament. At almost every tournament, TBF staff will be working alongside our research partners to collect valuable biological samples from fish brought to the docks and help advance the science that supports billfish conservation and management.

If you’re fishing or attending any of these tournaments, we’d love to share the latest updates on our research initiatives, answer your conservation questions, and sell you some raffle tickets. 

Our Groundswell Projects are also in full swing. Project Gulf is now underway, with the goal of deploying more than a dozen satellite tags on blue marlin throughout the Gulf. Thanks to the help of our headline sponsors, Columbia PFG and Garmin, these tags will provide valuable information on movement patterns, habitat use, and migration routes, helping fill important knowledge gaps for this iconic species.

Later this summer, we’ll return to Nantucket for the third season of the Skillie Project. Building on our past success, we’ll continue studying the region’s unique white marlin fishery while also testing an exciting new billfish tagging technology. Due to the support from our presenting sponsors, like Simms, Okuma, Woody Creek, and Viking Boatworks, we plan to deploy an innovative tag that has the potential to provide researchers with data more quickly, further strengthening the science that guides conservation efforts.

Whether we’re on the docks or on the water, we look forward to seeing many of you over the coming weeks and sharing updates from the field as these exciting projects unfold.