South Florida Sails dominate Walker’s Cay Open with six blue marlin releases

Big bites, not steady drips, decided Walker’s Cay for the South Florida Sails. Lee Albarty and Alex Stanley put together six blue marlin releases worth 2,925 points, and by Championship Sunday the South Florida crew had stretched the field into a nearly 1,500-point lead.

The 2026 Sport Fishing Championship Walker’s Cay Open ran May 14-17 at legendary Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas, billed at the venue as the third annual Walker’s Cay SFC Blue Marlin Open. The event used a modified IGFA format, with a Bahamas fishing permit required, lines in at 8:00 a.m. and lines out at 4:00 p.m. each day, a marina check-in deadline of 6:30 p.m., and an indoor, tent-style captain’s dinner and awards banquet. For offshore teams, that schedule left little room for hesitation once the boats cleared the dock.

That urgency showed up immediately. The tournament’s first scoring fish hit the sheet at 9:08 a.m. on Day 1, and the first blue marlin of the 2026 SFC season was released at 11:18 a.m. The early tempo made the pattern plain: crews that found the right water and stayed ready after lines-in had the best shot at the big, score-changing bites that separated the contenders from the rest.

South Florida Sails never let that edge slip. Across three days, Albarty and Stanley handled the scoring work while the team kept stacking releases instead of chasing single fish. By the time Championship Sunday arrived, the Sails were not managing a lead so much as protecting a runaway, and the event turned into a showcase for how a well-timed bite window can become an entire tournament.

The defending Walker’s Cay Open champions, the New Jersey Sea Birds, kept pressing despite a difficult setup. The crew arrived with a stuck trim tab and had dealt with steering issues earlier in the season in Key West, yet still battled into second and collected the first-ever 200-point bonus under the new Grand Slam scoring system after completing the slam. That bonus mattered, but it could not close the gap South Florida had built with marlin after marlin.

Walker’s Cay, about 105 miles off Jupiter, Florida, has long carried a reputation as a serious offshore proving ground in the Northern Abacos. This edition reinforced the old lesson in a modern points race: when the marlin bite turns loud, the teams that are clean, quick, and ready at the opening bell are the ones that turn one good window into a winning margin.