THE GREAT BARRIER REEF : Little Bites and Less Luck : BLACK MARLIN CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Steve Zuckerman sat in the shade, under the topside of Laurie Woodbridge’s sportfishing boat, escaping the blazing Coral Sea sun and reading a Tom Clancy novel.

So far, his quest for a world-record black marlin on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef wasn’t exactly off to a flying start. On his first day, he’d gone 1 for 7, caught fish to strikes. The six fish he didn’t catch were hooked briefly, then lost.

At 10:55 a.m., Woodbridge suddenly went full speed ahead on the throttle. Zuckerman, thinking Woodbridge was trying to set a hook in a marlin, threw down his novel and reached the fighting chair in three strides. False alarm. It was a rat, Woodbridge’s term for a black marlin weighing less than 500 pounds.

“He was following the long bait, whacking at it with his bill,” Woodbridge said. “I just wanted to get away from him. You don’t need him, right?”

“Right,” said Zuckerman, a Pacific Palisades builder who has been in fishing’s record book a dozen times and wants the 13th to be for the biggest marlin ever caught on rod and reel.

“What I have in mind is a black marlin on the order of 1,800 pounds,” he said, smiling and trying not to sound greedy.

“I think there’s an 1,800-pound fish out here somewhere, but Laurie doesn’t agree with me,” he said. “I’m pretty good at estimating the weight of a fish, as soon as I see one jump. I hardly ever kill a fish anymore, but the big ones I’ve gaffed and weighed in the past, I haven’t missed by much.

“But when that big one I want comes out of the water, I’ll know exactly if it’s the one. The really big marlin, the fish over 1,300 pounds, most of the time tend to have a huge girth. I lost one once that was almost square. I figured him to be 1,400, minimum.

“But sometimes, it doesn’t apply. Five years ago I caught a black here I figured to be 1200 pounds, and I released it. It was a perfectly symmetrical fish, and it fooled me. Weeks later, when I got the pictures back of him taken when it was just off the transom, I could see it was much bigger than 1,200.”

“I’ve had three fish on in the 1,400-pound class in my life, and lost all three. So I know what a fish that big looks like.”

The all-tackle world record black marlin is 1,560 pounds, a fish caught in 1953 by Alfred C. Glassell Jr. of Houston at Cabo Blanco, Peru.

In a day and a half, Woodbridge’s deckhands, David Beaudet and Ross McCubbin, used up almost 20 scad baits, and Woodbridge stopped the boat when he read what might be a scad school under the boat, on his electronic fish-finder.

The deckhands tossed out lines with small scad jigs, and Woodbridge dropped speed to a very slow troll.

“When you get hookups on these rigs, you have to bring these bait fish in really fast, or you’ll lose them to barracuda and mackerel,” McCubbin said. In an hour, the two deckhands had filled the bait box with 22 baits, the scad running 14 to 20 inches, and three rainbow runners in the 24-to-28-inch class.

Then the deckhands went to work--gutting the fish, then sewing waxed twine bridles onto their heads. The four-inch-long shafts of size-16 hooks were sewn inside the scad bellies, the mouths were sewn shut to prevent drag, and wire leader loops were attached to the bridles.

At 12:17 p.m., Woodbridge hollered, “Right ‘riggah!” indicating that a fish had taken the bait on the line running off the right outrigger pole. That sent Zuckerman flying toward the fighting chair, but Woodbridge called him off.

“Hold it, it’s a wahoo,” Woodbridge shouted. He scowled. The skipper was growing impatient with the Sea Baby II’s succession of muffed strikes, interference by barracuda and, of course, rats.

McCubbin brought in the four-foot, torpedo-shaped wahoo, one of the sea’s fastest swimmers and also one of its tastiest. Tomorrow, aboard the Esperance Star, the mother ship, the wahoo would become breakfast. 12:55 p.m.--”Right ‘riggah!”

There was a huge splash, from a marlin, at the long bait, but there was nothing on the line. Reeling in, Zuckerman and the deckhands observed that the scad had been chewed in half, and the ragged bite pattern indicated that a marlin had been there. Now it was 1 for 8, and a sense of frustration had descended upon the crew of Sea Baby II.

12:58 p.m.--”Right ‘riggah!” A marlin was chasing the long bait, slashing at it viciously with its bill. Its olive-black back was above the water line, as it continued to whack the bait. The line snapped off the outrigger, Woodbridge accelerated powerfully--and the fish was gone. Another half-eaten scad was reeled in. Beaudet examined the half-scad with disgust.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “This thing was in its mouth.”

The scad had not only been bitten in half, but what was left of it bore deep wounds from the marlin’s bill.

“They can do awesome damage with those bills,” Zuckerman said.

“In 1983, a grander whacked a kawakawa we were trolling around here with such force the bait fish almost completely disintegrated. It exploded, like a bomb. Tiny parts of that fish were flying in every direction. The only intact part was the head, which still had the hook on it. The head went end-over-end about 15 feet through the air . . . and the marlin’s head reappeared where the head came down, and he engulfed it.

“In almost 30 years, that’s still the most spectacular strike I ever saw. What makes it more memorable is that I caught that fish.”

1:21 p.m.--”Dave, look out!” Woodbridge shouted from topside, and hit the throttle for 8 or 10 seconds. The skipper had seen a big barracuda following the long bait, and wanted to leave him. Beaudet and McCubbin immediately threw a dozen ripe fish heads, kept for just such an encounter, into the water.

The thinking was that if a barracuda school was in the water, the toothy pests would be attracted to the fish heads and not the Sea Baby II’s baits. It worked.

At 2 p.m., another marlin, which Woodbridge pegged at 500 to 600 pounds, suddenly appeared, whacking the long bait with its bill. The line snapped off the outrigger, but after a few seconds of what looked like a certain hookup, slack line lay again on the water.

At roughly the same time, word came over the radio that a boat not far away had been hooked up to a grander for more than an hour. Then Woodbridge told everyone that a 1,247-pound black had been caught, killed and weighed, 15 miles to the north.

“OK, now I’m starting to feel like this guy,” Zuckerman said, tapping a photo of an angry-looking gorilla, posted on the cabin wall of Sea Baby II. The caption under the angry gorilla said: “Patience my . . . , I’m going to kill something.”

But not this day, and sadly, at 6 p.m., the lures were brought in and Woodbridge headed back to the Esperance Star. It hadn’t been a good day. Other than the false-start marlin strikes, the day’s only activity had been a constant changing of the baits caused by frequent attacks on the baits by barracuda and wahoo.

On the way in, more bad news came in on the radio, another boat reporting nine strikes and seven marlin caught. Two of the fish were estimated at more than 900 pounds.

“Our luck is just down,” Woodbridge muttered. “It’ll change.”

At the Esperance Star, the 56-foot mother ship, it was beer and a big platter of dogtooth tuna sashimi. Beaudet, an American from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, contributed a spicy Hawaiian sauce.

Talk turned to why the Sea Baby was having such rotten luck.

“We’re doing everything, right. It’ll change,” Woodbridge said again.

The writer asked why Aussies don’t drag teasers when marlin fishing, as is frequently the case in the marlin waters of Hawaii, Southern California and Cabo San Lucas. A teaser is an oversized lure, sometimes three feet long, with holes in it that put streams of bubbles into the water. Teasers are designed to attract marlin, which then, theoretically, notice the real baits or lures nearby.

“Teasers get in the way,” Woodbridge growled.

“When a grander hits, things happen real fast. You don’t have time to bring in a teaser. You’ve got a dangerous animal to deal with.

“With only two lines in the water and two deckhands, you’ve got one guy handling the rod and the other bringing in the second bait and getting it out of the way. Besides, the short bait, a lot of the time, acts as the teaser. Most strikes are on the long bait, but many of those fish come in first to look at the big bait on the short line.”

Talk of teaser lines turned to light lines. Zuckerman takes a dim view of the International Game Fish Assn.’s practice of offering world-record categories for billfish taken by ultra-light line fishermen.

“When someone catches, say, a 600 or 800-pound fish on 12 or 20-pound test line, the only way that happens is if the fish is choked to death,” said Zuckerman, who was fishing with 130-pound Dacron line on this trip.

“It’s impossible to set the hook in the jaw of a fish that big with light line like that. It simply can’t be done. You just can’t pull that hard on light line--it stretches. What happens is, the fish either gets the bait fish lodged in its throat or the fish is hooked in the throat and the bait fish gets stuck there.

“So water is blocked from passing through it gills, and it chokes to death. I call light-tackle catches like that chokers. “

And from chokers, the conversation turned to leaders. Zuckerman is using 25-foot wire leaders, instead of 300-pound test monofilament leaders--a slightly tougher proposition, he says, for getting strikes.

“With mono leaders, you get a much higher hookup percentage on big fish,” he said. “With wire, it’s tougher. However, with wire, if you get a clean hookup, your chances of catching the fish are much better than with mono.

“See, marlin swallow the bait head-first, and they will react to the difference in the feel of wire and mono.”

Zuckerman talked about the American fisherman who, in the mid-1960s, was the first man to confirm what many only speculated upon previously--that there was a substantial population of huge black marlin for part of the year at the outer edges of the Great Barrier Reef.

“His name was George Bransford, and he served for the U.S. Army in Australia during World War II,” Zuckerman said. “He moved here in about 1964 and was curious about the large numbers of small black marlin, 30- to 80-pound-class fish, that people caught inside the reef with light tackle. He believed the inner-reef waters were a black marlin nursery, and that those fish were spawned somewhere in the area. But even by the mid-1960s, no one had ever seriously fished for big marlin, outside.

“So he got a boat, and he and another guy spent a day or two outside the reef off Cairns in 1966 and he caught a 1,064-pound fish--and Cairns hasn’t been the same since.”