A ‘GRANDER’ STRIKES : For the First Time on His Trip, Steve Zuckerman Finds Himself Matched With a Worthy Black Marlin

After an hour’s uneventful trolling aboard Sea Baby II off ribbon reef No. 4, skipper Laurie Woodbridge decided to break with the conventional trolling practice of dragging a scad far from the boat and a small tuna near the boat, on the surface.

“Let’s run a downrigger,” he told deckhand David Beaudet. Out came a downrigger, a contraption involving an eight-pound weight and a cable that runs a trolling line straight down under the boat to a clip, then allows the bait to be run straight back and deep, presenting the bait to a prospective marlin at a depth of about 20 feet.

On surface strikes, Southern California big game fisherman Steve Zuckerman, after three days on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, was 2 for 12.

The downrigger provided no improvement. For 30 minutes, not so much as a nudge. Put it away, Woodbridge ordered.

The trolling baits went back on the surface, and then, finally, some big game fishing excitement began, although not the kind the fisherman had anticipated.

As Zuckerman was telling a story of a marlin he’d once caught that swallowed a bait three times. . . .

“Left ‘riggah!” Woodbridge shouted. “Nice fish!”

For the first time in four days, a marlin had struck at the short bait, a 12-pound kawakawa tuna. The marlin was visible only for an instant, then, with the bait in its mouth, disappeared in an enormous splash.

Zuckerman was handed the rod, but there was a problem. A rope tying the rod to the boat--to prevent a strike from yanking the rod into the ocean--had somehow become wrapped around the deck hose. While Ross McCubbin, the other deckhand, scrambled to free it, Zuckerman had to stand and wait for a perilous few seconds, holding a rod to which was attached a furious marlin weighing more than 500 pounds.

Finally, Zuckerman got into the fighting chair, and the quarter-inch steel safety cable was clipped to both sides of the reel. Almost before it was secured, Zuckerman was standing on the footboard, using his weight and the leverage generated by his legs to try to pull the marlin’s head around.

The fish made a long, powerful run, and the line rose to the surface.

“Here he comes!” Woodbridge shouted, alerting a photographer to a jump by the fish. The marlin cleared the surface completely, twisted and turned, its head violently slashing the air. The fish landed full length on the surface, pancaked and sent up an enormous splash.

It sounded immediately, and Zuckerman tightened his drag, shifted to a lower gear on the reel and tried to turn the marlin’s head.

Suddenly, there was a sickening crack, loud as a rifle shot. The only immediate certainty was that something important had broken. The rod was torn from Zuckerman’s, hands and he was flying out of the chair, as if about to go overboard.

Beaudet, standing to Zuckerman’s left at the transom, had his hands up, though, and somehow grabbed the rod with both hands as it flew past his face.

McCubbin discovered that the chair harness’ steel cable had parted. The harness is supposed to secure the rod--and its $1,800 reel--to the chair. Zuckerman, back in the chair, was handed the rod again, and McCubbin quickly produced a backup harness.

Zuckerman, fighting the marlin once again, was trying to gain line on the fish when the line suddenly went slack.

Amid groans all around, another fish was gone, and nobody knew quite why.

“Very dangerous animals,” Zuckerman muttered, still slightly shaken by the experience with the harness. “It just shows you how strong these big fish are. I thought the chair had broken in half. I’ve never had a harness break on me. I had the drag set on 45 pounds, and all of a sudden the rod was just ripped out of my hands.

“I wasn’t in any danger of going over, I was just trying to grab the rod. Dave just happened to have his hands in the right place to grab it. The butt or the reel could have knocked him in the head and injured him.

“Fishing with heavy tackle like this is much more dangerous than light-tackle fishing. With all the force you’re putting on all the connecting points, if something breaks, look out.”

Looking up at Woodbridge, Zuckerman asked: “How big was it?”

“Seven, eight,” Woodbridge said. Zuckerman laughed, wanting a bigger estimate. “Laurie, you’re too tough,” he said.

With new baits out, Zuckerman was telling why Mrs. Zuckerman never accompanies him on his Australian fishing adventures.

“At our wedding years ago, she turned to someone in the reception line and said, ‘Thank God. Now I don’t have to go on any more of those awful fishing trips.’ ”

Twenty minutes later, Zuckerman had dozed off in the fighting chair. Woodbridge awakened him with a start by nudging the throttle, suggesting a strike, and Zuckerman not only woke up but jumped out of the chair, to laughs all around.

Woodbridge hates it when fishermen fall asleep--particularly a fisherman who says he wants to catch a 1,800-pound marlin.

“Laurie really got me a couple of years ago,” Zuckerman said. “I’d fallen asleep in the chair, and all of a sudden, he guns the engine and he’s screaming, ‘Monster fish! Monster fish!’ The deckhand hands me the rod--and they’d taken the handle off my reel.”

It was late afternoon, and the Sea Baby II crew seemed to have settled back into the doldrums of the first three days of Zuckerman’s 13-day trip.

It was hot, dead calm and quiet. Woodbridge had the Sea Baby II working the northeast corner of ribbon reef No. 4 and was steering his sportfisher over relatively shallow water, a few hundred yards from where Coral Sea surf was breaking over the outer edge of the reef.

For Zuckerman, Beaudet and McCubbin, it was a momentary diversion from the disappointment left by more than three days of largely unsuccessful fishing.

For the moment, everyone enjoyed the view, straight down.

“We’ve got 60 feet of water under us,” Woodbridge said from upstairs, reading his depth finder.

The water was spectacularly clear. Every chunk of coral, every bottom feature, every coral pattern could be seen clearly. Fish darted among the coral structures.

Soon, though, the sightseeing was over and the trolling lines went out again. Tiny, dragonfly-sized flying fish sailed over the surface of the blue Coral Sea. It was another 90-degree, cloudless, windless day.

At 5:01 p.m., Woodbridge yelled: “Right ‘riggah! Nice fish! Nice fish!”

Everyone but Woodbridge saw only a swift swirl of water over the long bait. Woodbridge, though, had seen the huge marlin’s bill out of the water and the top half of its enormous forked tail. There was no jump and the line was already screaming off the reel and headed nearly straight down by the time Zuckerman grabbed the rod and made it to the fighting chair.

In the first five minutes of the struggle, the fish made an almost casual pass beneath the boat, about 30 feet down, and the crew saw its broad, olive-green back.

Zuckerman, for the first time on this trip, soon found himself matched with a fish he couldn’t control. For every 20 yards of Dacron line he retrieved, the big black took 30 more. After 20 minutes, in the hot late afternoon sun, Zuckerman was sweating profusely.

With the drag set on 45 pounds, Zuckerman stopped reeling. The boat’s engines were in neutral. Steadily, the great fish was pulling the 40-foot boat backward, in a southerly direction.

“How big?” Zuckerman asked Woodbridge.

“I only saw the bill and the tail. He has the length to be a grander,” Woodbridge said.

(It’s actually a “she.” Biologists say that all the 500-pound-plus black marlin in Great Barrier Reef waters in October and November are spawning females.)

Curiously, after 30 minutes, the fish was still deep and had yet to jump. Zuckerman’s reel, growing hot, began to emit squeaks as the marlin pulled off more line.

Woodbridge said: “I don’t think it’s tail-wrapped, but it might be body-wrapped. I don’t know why else it wouldn’t have jumped by now.”

At the 40-minute mark and with several hundred yards of line still out, Zuckerman said: “I make him a thousand to twelve-hundred, Laurie.”

Woodbridge retorted, sneering: “Eight hundred, and hooked right in the corner of the jaw.”

The Woodbridge needle is sharpest when a fisherman seems unable to handle a big fish.

“Steve, we’re going to be late for dinner,” he said. “How about if I drag him up on the shallows for you? We can use the upwelling to put him right in the surf. That’s a service I provide for some of my older fishermen.”

More needles came in over the radio. By then, radio chatter all over the ribbon reef system had it that Dr. Z was on a big one.

At the one-hour mark, Woodbridge, worried about shallow water and approaching darkness, did begin drawing the fish into the shallows of ribbon reef No. 2. Still, the big marlin hadn’t surfaced.

“We got to start worrying about tigers (sharks) now,” Woodbridge muttered. Tiger sharks, up to 2,000 pounds on the Great Barrier Reef, can quickly reduce a thousand-pound marlin to a skeleton, but only if they’re wounded or dead. Alive, marlin are many times faster.

Just before 6 p.m., normal quitting time, Woodbridge called the Esperance Star, the mother ship: “We’re on a nice one, givin’ us a bit of trouble. We’ll be late.”

Checking the depth finder, Woodbridge told Zuckerman it was time to go to the whip.

“All right, Steve, we’re at 80 feet, his belly’s gotta be scraping bottom. Get him up, now. I don’t want to be out here in the dark.”

The sun was close to setting, and the air had cooled somewhat, but Zuckerman had sweated completely through his shirt. He shifted to low gear on the reel and worked the fish upward with a rapid, hard-pumping action.

In several minutes, the entire fish was seen for the first time since the opening minutes of the battle, in 60 feet of water. It looked like a dark submarine, a long shadow, gliding by silently, just below the stern.

“Oh, he’s a nice one,” Woodbridge said, looking down. The skipper was nervous as the Sea Baby II slowly made its way toward the reef’s surf line. He watched the depth finder more than he watched Zuckerman.

The fish, more clearly seen now, changed colors, a phenomenon characteristic of billfish. From blue-black, the marlin’s back was suddenly a soft purple, then all blue.

But still there was no jump. Both fisherman and marlin were near exhaustion. Beaudet put on his heavy gloves and watched for the leader. Zuckerman was only 20 feet away from having the 25-foot wire leader within grabbing distance of Beaudet. When a deckhand grabs a wire leader, the fish becomes a legal catch.

“We’re in 25 feet of water,” Woodbridge barked. “If you don’t get him in in five minutes, we’re going back to deep water.”

In a minute or two, Beaudet grabbed the leader and the great marlin rose quickly, no fight left. It bobbed to the surface and slowly rolled over on its side, exposing a massive girth. Zuckerman studied the fish’s length, 13 or 14 feet, and its ample girth.

“Steve, what do you want to do with him?” Woodbridge shouted.

“Release him,” Zuckerman said, unhooking his harness, an hour and 12 minutes after he’d been handed the rod. With a towel, he wiped off his face. Deckhand McCubbin stuck a fisheries tag in the marlin’s shoulder, and Beaudet, with wire cutters, snipped the leader near the fish’s jaw.

Everyone watched anxiously as the marlin drifted slowly away from the boat, on its side. Slowly, then, it righted itself and with a slow, lateral sweep of its great tail, glided beneath the surface and receded slowly into the darkness.

Woodbridge, nervous about being in the shallows, backed the boat up to slightly deeper water, turned and accelerated quickly away, toward the mother ship.

“All right, what will you give me for that one?” Zuckerman asks.

“Ten-fifty, eleven-hundred,” Woodbridge replied, almost grudgingly. “Ten-fifty, absolute minimum.”

If he was right, it was Zuckerman’s 23rd grander on the Great Barrier Reef since 1971. Still, it was about 750 pounds short of the fish he really came after.