Fishing: The Budget Marlin

Most of the million visitors who crowd into Ocean City, Md., each summer go there to rest, and for them miniature golf counts as a strenuous sport. But Ocean City also lures a hardier type: the sport fisherman. Hotel phone operators spot him easily: he is the fel low who asks to be called at 5 a.m., and again at 5:30, “just to make sure.” By 6:30, he has gobbled down break fast, swallowed a Dramamine pill, and scoured the sleeping town for a six-pack of cold beer. Half an hour later, he is aboard a motorboat, headed for the Jack Spot, a ten-square-mile expanse of shoal water with one simple claim to fame: there, each summer, congregates the densest concentration of white marlin in the world.

Fish Out of Water. Compared with its giant kin, the Atlantic blue marlin and the black marlin, the white seems almost pygmyish. The biggest white mar lin ever boated weighed 161 lbs., as against rod-and-reel records of 810 lbs. for the blue and 1,560 lbs. for the black. But for fishermen who cannot afford to chase the blues to the Bahamas or the blacks to Panama, the silvery, long-billed white marlin is a mettlesome substitute. Pound for pound, it is one of the sea’s most exciting and annoying game fish. Wily and wary, the white marlin will trail a trolling boat for miles, inspecting the bait, even tapping it tentatively with its bill, then turn tail and nonchalantly swim away, with curses raining down over its wake. Or it will grab the bait sideways in its jaws, neatly avoiding the hook, then spit it back into the water with what seems a shrug of disgust. Skilled fishermen sometimes try to trick a white marlin onto the hook by “racing” the bait (skipping it swiftly along the surface), then suddenly dropping it backward as the openmouthed fish approaches. Even that tactic often fails. “Ain’t nothing in the ocean so hard to outguess as a marlin,” says one Ocean City charter-boat captain. “All I’ve learned in 15 years is never to expect no favors from them.”

If it is hard to get a white marlin on the hook, it is even harder to keep it there. An angry white marlin can swim at 60 m.p.h. In its strong, tenacious struggle to throw the hook, it often thrusts out of the water 20 times or more in “tailwalking” jumps and long “greyhounding” leaps, sometimes lunges at the stern of a boat with enough force to impale a careless fisherman on its bill.

Flags on the Rigging. The white marlin’s poundage makes it a light-tackle fish by strict fishermanly standards, but charter-boat skippers usually load their reels with 50-lb. test line to give their clients a fighting chance. Even so, the big ones often get away. But there are days when everything goes right, when the marlins gobble every bait in sight, when the Jack Spot boils with leaping fish, and blue and white flags flutter gaily on the rigging of the boats—one flag for each marlin caught.

Once the happy fisherman is ashore and his catch is measured and weighed, other kinds of fish swarm around him. He pays the captain ($110), throws in a tip ($10), poses for a photograph with his marlin ($2), gets loaded up with certificates and buttons attesting his fortitude and skill (free). Then, while he is weak with pride, a stranger comes up to him, bubbles congratulations and whips out an order pad. “Guess you’ll be wanting it mounted,” he says.

“Sure,” smiles the fisherman. “How much?” “

Well, let’s see. Your fish is 6 ft. 7 in. At $1.50 an inch, that comes to $118.50.” The fisherman’s smile fades. “You understand, of course,” the stranger says soothingly, “that we can arrange an installment plan.”