Big Daddy, Won't You Please Come Home?

The story of a fish is not always a fish story. But any story about Big Daddy sounds like one. Big Daddy is an Atlantic blue marlin. Nobody knows how big he is, but he is no smaller than 1,000 lbs. Nobody knows, either, how many of him there are, but his nickname is surely generic. And he is the most coveted catch in the sea.

Tommy Gifford has seen Big Daddy "at least six times." A charterboat captain for 50 years, Gifford, 71, had his first encounter with a giant blue off Bimini in 1936. "I was skippering for a fisherman named Mike Lerner," recalls Gifford, "and we hooked into this fish at 3 p.m. What a scene that was! The marlin jumped 25 times, and tail-walked through the entire fleet of boats. At one point, he jumped so close to my boat that he threw barrels of water into our faces and darned near drowned us. We fought him for eight hours until he straightened a 14/0 hook into a hatpin and broke off. I would guess that he weighed at least 1,800 lbs."

Dozens of other anglers have tangled with Big Daddy--and always come off second best. A few years ago, Bermuda's Captain Russell Young had an epic 31-hour battle with a marlin that he estimated at 15 ft. long. Young actually brought the fish to gaff six times. Each time the gaff tore loose, and Big Daddy finally escaped when the line parted. Last year Dr. Lyman Spire of Fayetteville, N.Y., was trolling off St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands when a monster blue crashed the bait on his ul tralight 12-lb.-test line. Spire was so discombobulated that he "bird's-nested" his reel; the line snapped. "It's just as well," he sighed. "Otherwise I would have lost all that good line."

High Price. One big incentive behind the hunt for Big Daddy is the price on his head. Miami's Tycoon/Fin-Nor Corp. will pay $5,000 to the first angler who lands a 1,000-lb. blue marlin on its fishing tackle; there is another $1-per-lb. reward if the fish is caught off the Virgin Islands, and $10,000 if it is boated off Puerto Rico.

Closest yet to the prize was a catch made on July 4 off St. Thomas by an experienced and appropriately named big-game angler who already had 20 blues to his credit. Aboard Captain Johnny Harms's Savana Bay, Elliot Fishman had just reached the grounds and was still wiping his sunglasses when it happened. "I glanced out," he recalls, "and there was this s.o.b., coming like blazes with his mouth wide open. I struck him, and that brute jumped 19 times." It took Fishman 3 hrs. 28 min. to boat the marlin. At the dock four hours later (during which time it undoubtedly lost weight by dehydration), the marlin measured 13 ft. 1 in. in length and tipped the scales at 845 lbs.--a new world record by 34 lbs.

Big Daddy is still out there waiting. Only a day after Fishman broke the record, David Massey, another Virgin Islander, was fighting a 700-lb. blue marlin when he looked over his shoulder and saw "ten or twelve others circling the boat, including one that had to be 20 ft. long." The guesses on the weight of that fish range up to 2,000 lbs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.