My first outing was a half-day charter, from 7am until midday. I might as well have stayed in bed — there was not a single nibble. On day five I signed up with the Picante fleet in San Lucas marina. As I was fishing alone, I chose their smallest fisherman, the 31ft Picante Express and her captain, Roberto. We were at sea for eight hours. There were three strikes: two bonito the size of trout, and a yellowfin tuna no bigger than my forearm. For deep-sea fans, this was pathetic.
Day seven was the eve of my departure, and Roberto suggested we go out even earlier, leaving the marina at 6.30am. We pounded out in the Pacific for an hour, then streamed our four lures. Three hours went by. Nothing. I began to think this was a fishless sea. After 10, something struck. Whatever it was, it was big. The port side outrigger jerked crazily. The Penn reel emitted a high-pitched scream as it whirred round and the 80lb test line almost smoked as it went out.
Those who know sea angling will recall the chaos that occurs on an afterdeck when men lulled half to sleep by the cradle-rocking of the ocean suddenly hurl themselves all over the place. As the customer, I just threw myself into the fighting chair and yelled for the boatman to pass me the rod. And still the line roared out.
Taking the bucking rod from the boatman's hands, I waited for the fish on the other end to cease its first freedom run. It finally did so and I was able to turn the handle on the reel and recover a few feet of line. This caused the line to go taut; thus it would remain for the duration of the fight. With a sinking heart I noted the fish had taken half a mile of line, and each inch would have to be recovered with sweat and pain. Above my head on his flying bridge, Roberto was yelling "Marlin," and far down the wake the pelagic predator roared out of the sea, glittering turquoise, aquamarine, slate and sea spray for one magical moment before plunging back under water. Then it began to fight.
Big-game fishing is perhaps the last contest between man and wild beast, with the possible exception of bullfighting. I read somewhere that, pound for pound, the strongest animal on land is the Siberian tiger. In the ocean it is the marlin. Other fish may fight with all the strength they can muster, but they all tire before the fisherman. Only the marlin goes on and on, hour after hour. It has 1m years of evolution to bring to the struggle, unbelievable stamina, and (in this case, off Mexico) what Roberto estimated at 550-600lb of protein-packed muscle.
The angler has the technology of a carbon-fibre rod whose springiness absorbs some of the shocks of the plunging fish, a brass reel with a mile of line, and that thin filament of nylon with a breaking strain of 80lb. The key is the reel. It has a slipping clutch, set in this case at 50lb. When the fish pulls more than this, the line unwinds against the drag and the angler can only hold on and suffer. Even as the fight started, I realised I had two disadvantages. Trying to economise, I'd booked a boat with basic equipment, and that included the fighting chair. When I yelled for the harness, a shrug told me there wasn't one. Not good news. The harness helps spread the strain from wrists and arms to the chest and torso. It also links the angler to the chair. A big fish has been known to jerk the angler clean into the sea. The other disadvantage was the boatman, whose job is to assist the angler once a big fish is on the hook. Unfortunately, I had observed mine was as thick as a plank.
Foot by foot the half-mile of line came back onto the reel. Then the marlin broke away and took it back. It is a matter of serious grief to hold onto a rod with screaming muscles and see the reel being stripped back almost to the brass drum. But that is what it is all about. The marlin takes the strain; the angler takes the pain. The contest is about who will concede first: man or beast.
Within that first hour the marlin came to within 50 yards of the boat 10 times, and 10 times took all that line back again. Halfway into the second hour I thought the freedom runs were getting shorter and the pauses longer. Then the marlin took another 600ft of line back and the contest began again. You do not get to love a marlin that is trying to pull your arms out. In fact, the language gets bluer than the ocean. But you learn to respect it. After two hours my hands were arthritic claws. Twenty times the fish had broken away and almost stripped the rod; 1,000 times I had hauled back, leant forward and clawed a few more feet back onto the drum. My watch told me later it was two hours and 40 minutes after the strike when the great fish came up under the stern and touched the boat with her javelin bill. That counts as caught.
Of the boatman I could only see two trousered buttocks as he leant over the stern to the water. What he thought he was going to do with 550lb of marlin I do not know. Lift it out of the water? I noticed the hook of the flying gaff still unused in the corner, and knew that if he plunged that 10in spike into her, the lady of the sea was dead. Roberto was coming down the ladder from the flying bridge to lend a hand. He would surely not forget the gaff. There was a bait knife sliding about in the scuppers. I leant down from the chair and cut the line. In a second she was gone, back to her cool, dark home below. Roberto made plain he was not a happy mariner. After a while I realised he would have received a premium for bringing home a dead marlin of that size, so I asked how much it would have been and made him happy with a $100 bill.
I will not fish off Mexico again, because I strongly support the tag-and-release scheme. The trouble is, the Third World spares nothing, which is why game-fishing hotspots are getting cooler and cooler. Fish are not all that stupid. When they sense they are taking repeated losses near a certain coast, they avoid it.
So we stacked the rods and headed back to port. A dip in the ice bucket gave me some feeling back in the hands, but the arms and shoulders felt for a day afterwards that they had been on a Tudor rack from the Tower of London. Still, it was the biggest marlin (or any fish) of my life, and I am glad that somewhere, with the hook long disintegrated, she is hunting her lunch as nature intended.
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