Eleven days on Bermagui's blue water, four rods constantly in the spread, and not a lot to show for it until Day 5. That is the short version of Episode 64 from Get'n Nibz, the Australian YouTube channel that has built its audience on long offshore missions rather than highlight reels. The longer version is the story of how Lewis, fishing alongside skipper Michael Scerri off Bermagui on the NSW south coast, finally hooked his first striped marlin, an estimated 120-kilo fish, and got it cleanly tagged and released.
The crew started the run flat. Day one through four delivered one tail-thump that may or may not have been a frigate, a turnaround at the south end of Montague Island in roughly 300 metres of water short of the Kink as Scerri battled a stomach bug, and the local Bermagui pool competition keeping them tied up ashore on the in-between nights. By the time the fifth day rolled around, on 6 February 2026 (a date Scerri called out on camera because it was his mother's birthday), the crew was overdue for a hit.
The spread that did the work was the same one they had been running all week, Pakula jet heads on Shimano Tiagra 24-kilo reels behind daisy-chain teasers. While most of the other Bermagui crews were rigging skip baits, Get'n Nibz stayed with lures. "We had the daisy chains connected to the lures and we were teasing them out the back with the lure connected to it, and yeah, it worked for us," Scerri said.
Lewis fought the marlin for around 35 minutes. The fish put on the usual stripe-marlin aerial display, screamed line off the Tiagra and ended up tail-wrapped at the boat. Scerri ran the deck calmly through the leader sequence, telling Lewis at the rail: "All right, Michael. Come here. Disconnecting the rope. Don't put the teasers in the boat." The fish was kept in the water, tagged, and released cleanly. "Let him go. Yes, she lived," Lewis said as the marlin swam off.
It was the trip's signature moment. "First striped marlin. We did it," Lewis said, a young angler's reaction to a fish that takes most game-fishermen years to land. Scerri, who lost a Tiagra setup overboard the previous season, was as satisfied with the gear performance as with the result: "This is the new one that replaced it. And this is the one I just caught the new marlin on. So yeah, she works. All my rigging that I did all worked. Nothing broke. Crimping I did, everything held together."
The trip threw in a bonus on the final day, a small bull mahi-mahi that piled into a lure half its body length and was safely released after a quick photo. It was the only highlight of a seven-hour final troll that opened with a marlin sunbathing on the surface and produced no second hookup. Across Saturday and the last day the crew put around 250 kilometres on the engine.
Get'n Nibz also flagged the trip's most sobering moment, an afternoon spent fighting their way home through wind and swell that had built faster than the forecast suggested. They credited Scerri's new Bar Crusher 670 HT for the dry run back, a reminder for any south-coast NSW marlin crew that February shelf-edge conditions can flip quickly and that boat choice matters as much as lure choice when the swell stacks up.