ANOTHER KIND OF BITE : Fishermen Must Compete With Sharks When Trying to Catch a Black Marlin

Laurie Woodbridge, the normally taciturn black marlin skipper of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, was talking about sharks. Tiger sharks.

He was topside, at the helm of his 40-foot sportfisher, Sea Baby II, dragging a pair of baits off ribbon reef No. 2, where on the previous evening, his fisherman, Steve Zuckerman, had caught a black marlin estimated at 1,050 to 1,100 pounds.

“Sharkwise, we were lucky yesterday,” he said. “We had that big fish in shallow water, and a lot of times, that brings in tigers. They’ll follow a marlin in, and start taking him apart. If someone catches and kills a big marlin around here and wants to weigh it, they’ll take it back to their mother ship and weigh it. If you leave the carcass in the water overnight, the tigers will come, in the night. Big ones, too--2,000 pounds. In bed at night, you’ll wake up, listening to their snouts bumping on the hull, while they feed. By morning, there’ll just be the skeleton left.

“We don’t see a lot of great white sharks up here. You generally find them down south, around Sydney and Melbourne, in colder water.”

Tiger sharks are game fish, and some American big game fishermen fly all the way to the Great Barrier Reef just to fish for them. The all-tackle world record for tigers is a 1,314-pounder caught off Queensland in 1953. Tiger sharks are only slightly smaller than great whites, and have flatter, bulldog-like snouts.

“Tiger jaws were a big deal around here, after the movie, ‘Jaws,’ came out,” Woodbridge said.

“A lot of deckies (deckhands) were coming out here, catching tigers, getting maybe a hundred dollars for the jaws. One time a guy I knew caught a big one, around a thousand (pounds). He got him to the stern, put a gaff in his belly, put five slugs from a .38 into his head, then cut a long strip off his gut to use for bait.

“He also had a big, dead tuna in the water, on a line. He got occupied doing something else, then returned and discovered the tiger was eating the tuna.

“Tiger sharks will eat anything they can find that’s dead, but they’re not fast, so they can’t catch much. One thing they can catch, though, is turtles. I’ve never cut open a tiger’s stomach that didn’t have a chunk of a turtle shell in it. They love turtles. If they catch a 200-pound turtle, they’ll bite through the whole thing with one bite, then eat the whole thing.”

On the deck, Zuckerman sat in the fighting chair, reading a novel. On the previous day, he had caught the big marlin but he had also narrowly missed injury when a steel cable connecting his fishing pole to the chair had parted during a battle with another marlin, one weighing 700 to 800 pounds.

He talked about gruesome fishing injuries, mentioning in particular a condition known on the Great Barrier Reef as being “frogged.”

“It happens to inexperienced fishermen, or to someone who comes down here not in tip-top shape,” Zuckerman said.

“You fight these big fish with your legs, not your arms. So let’s say a guy is on a grander (a thousand-pound marlin), and he’s standing on the fighting chair’s footboard, pulling hard on the fish. Thirty minutes go by, and he’s getting tired. All of a sudden his knees go weak. If the marlin is pulling on him at that point, and his knees go, his entire body slams down on this footboard . . . “

Woodbridge chimed in: “ . . . and he winds up with his ankles up around his ears, and we have to call the med-evac helicopter out from the mainland, to take him to an orthopedist.”

“Left ‘riggah!” Woodbridge suddenly shouted from above, meaning something important was happening to the kawakawa tuna being trolled on the left side, the line running through the left outrigger pole.

There was a big splash that buried the 12-pound tuna. Zuckerman tossed his novel over his shoulder. The deckhands lunged for the rod but suddenly, the line went slack.

“That was a rat, maybe a five (500-pounder),” Woodbridge said, resuming trolling speed.

Seven minutes later, another Cairns-based sportfisher, the Absolut, was hooked up to a medium-size black marlin. Woodbridge observed the leaping fish with binoculars, put them down and said: “I think it’s the same fish that hit us.”

A slow two hours passed, and then . . .

“Left ‘riggah!”

A long, black bill was slashing through the air, behind the kawakawa. The big marlin engulfed the bait, then disappeared in a huge splash. At first, the line headed straight down, then abruptly began rising. Zuckerman tightened the drag slightly.

The fish broke the surface and began a series of spectacular, twisting leaps, clearing the surface by 10-12 feet. Shaking its head with great shudders, it sent spiraling sprays of water that glistened in the sunlight.

This was a command performance that had the deckhands cheering. The marlin had not made a long run on Zuckerman’s 130-pound-test Dacron line, and was jumping about 50 yards behind the stern.

“How big?” Zuckerman asked. Actually, he had a perfectly good idea how big the fish was. He was trying to learn by how much the taskmaster skipper would underestimate it.

“Eight, nine,” Woodbridge barked. “It’s not a grander.”

Said deckhand David Beaudet: “It’s an awful nice fish, Steve, but there’s no way it’s as big as yesterday’s.”

The marlin made a long run, but Zuckerman slowly brought him back. After another run, Zuckerman brought him back again. But when the marlin made a long, steady third run, Zuckerman could only watch the line peel off his reel. This marlin, everyone agreed, was a tougher fish than the previous day’s grander.

After an hour, the marlin was still 250 yards out, fighting in deep water.

“We’re over 35 fathoms (210 feet),” Woodbridge said. “We got to start worrying about tigers now.”

Two minutes later, the line suddenly went slack and settled softly onto the Coral Sea.

Zuckerman, disappointed, slumped in the chair, exhausted.

Beaudet reeled in the line. When he came to a frayed end of the Dacron, he showed it to Woodbridge.

“I think he got the line on the edge of the reef and chaffed you off, Steve,” Woodbridge said.

Zuckerman said: “I think I had him body-wrapped, after about 30 minutes. It felt like I was pulling him sideways.”

Later, over beer at the mother ship, the Esperance Star, Woodbridge talked about size estimates of big marlin.

“Up to 1,200 pounds, I can come within 50 pounds, just looking at them in the water,” he said.

“After that, it’s tougher. See, above 1,200, another two inches in length and two more inches in girth means another 150 pounds.”

Zuckerman talked about the three 1,400-pound class marlin he’d lost since 1971.

“Sometimes when they don’t have that enormous gut on them, they’ll fool you,” he said. “In 1976, a friend of mine, Buster May, had a big one at the boat, and we all figured around a grand. He was just about to say, ‘Release him,’ when I noticed he was perfectly proportioned, and I told Buster he’d better put a gaff in him.

“When we weighed it, it was 1,342 pounds, and a world record for 80-pound test.”

Woodbridge talked about fishing for little black marlins.

“Our season for the big blacks is just about over out here on the outer reef by early December,” he said. “January through June in Queensland is our wet (rainy season), so I use the time to work on the boat, in Cairns. In June, our light tackle season starts for Spanish mackerel and little blacks, inside the reef.

“There’s a lot of fishing for 30- to 80-pound blacks on light line. I’ve had fishermen catch nine little blacks in one day. One time I had a guy catch seven, all on four-pound line.”

Talk then turned to the crew of Sea Baby II, and destinations after the Great Barrier Reef season.

Woodbridge would go back to Cairns, haul his boat out of the water and work on it.

Beaudet planned to return briefly to his home at Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, then head for the other side of the world, to Abidjan, the Ivory Coast, to skipper a sportfisher for a French marlin fisherman.

McCubbin was going to return home to Surfer’s Paradise, Australia, where he surfs and operates a small commercial fishing boat.

Zuckerman was planning to leave the Sea Baby II in about a week, tour some Australian orchards, leave for Hawaii to check on his macadamia nut investments, then continue on to his home in Pacific Palisades and to his building business. One day, he said, he’ll return to the Great Barrier Reef with his son.

“Will is only 8 now, and he’s not big enough for these fish yet,” Zuckerman said. But he’s getting there. He caught his first marlin, a blue, at Kona a few months ago on 30-pound test. It was a 113-pounder. It wore him out, but he wouldn’t let anyone help him. I was so proud of him.”

Zuckerman fished 13 days on the Sea Baby II. He caught one more marlin weighing more than 1,000 pounds, on the 13th day. His sixth day was his best for big fish. He caught three that went 800 pounds or more.

“Laurie called one of them 990 pounds,” Zuckerman said later. “He wouldn’t give me a grand.”

The final, 13-day box score: 40 strikes, 23 hookups, 14 fish tagged and released. Two of them were granders, his 23rd and 24th thousand-pound marlin on the Great Barrier Reef.