Animals: Montauk Marlin

Miserable though it made people on land, the “humiture wave” (see p. 9) brought joy to seagoing sportsmen, especially to anglers after big game fish off Montauk Point, L. I. There, unaccustomed water temperatures (as high as 76°) brought Gulf Stream fish out of their normal ranges. Last week a blue runner was caught, and Sportsman S. Clay Williams Jr. hooked & landed the first blue marlin ever taken off Montauk on rod & reel, a 215-pounder.

Blue marlin have often been sighted off Montauk; two years ago an 892-pounder was harpooned. Getting them to take a bait is the problem in northern waters.

Day after Sportsman Williams’ catch, another blue marlin, a monster, was feeling warm enough to strike at a fresh squid trolled by Sportsman Julian Carr Stanley, fishing with Captain Herman Jacobsen on the launch Mongoose. The fish ripped the line from its outrigger clip on his first rush, then took the hook solidly when Mr.

Stanley artfully passed the lure back a second time.

A five-hour tussle ensued, the marlin’s sharp dorsal fin and sickle tail slicing the ocean swells as he fought on the surface, his great cobalt-&-silver length breaching into the air five or six times as he “walked on his tail” to shake the hook.

Angler Stanley’s tackle was adequate (14-0 reel, 36-thread line) but the Mongoose’s cockpit afforded him no proper foot rest to fight so big a fish. His friend, William Hale Harkness, had to spell him on the rod. Evening was at hand before they had their monster subdued—and then it sounded (dived deep). They began the laborious job of “pumping” the dying fish to the top, when violent thrashing on their line and clouds of blood deep in the water told them that something else was after their fish—sharks! By the time they raised the marlin and got a rope around its tail, its belly and sides were slashed away to the backbone. The head and midsection broke off, slid back into the depths.

All they pulled in was the tail-section, up to the ventral rudder fins, of a blue marlin which would easily have broken all northern-water records.