It Takes 24 Hours to Land This Monster

The boat was filthy and the air was filled with bugs and soot, borne by easterly Santa Ana winds from the mainland. Karl Kogler and Steve Crilly wondered about it but didn’t have time to dwell on it.

“I kept looking at the footprints on the deck and wondering, where in the world are we tracking this dirt from?” Kogler said. “The boat was just covered with ashes. We were fighting ashes all night, in the eyes and everything. There were moths, dragonflies, tiny flies--all sorts of stuff. I saw a hummingbird go by.”

Few, least of all the two Costa Mesa fishermen, will forget what they were doing during the Southern California fires in the fall of ’93. Through the peak hours of the flames last week, for 15 minutes short of 24 hours aboard Kogler’s 25-foot My Turn II a few miles off the west end of Santa Catalina Island, they had their hands full with a 213 1/2-pound broadbill swordfish.

This was Kogler’s second swordfish, following a 220.7-pound catch in 1990, and only the fifth claimed by a local sportfisherman on rod and reel this year.

“They shouldn’t even be rated a fish,” he said. “They’re a different kind of animal . . . a monster.”

His first one was much easier: 1 hour 27 minutes. “The way it should be,” Kogler said.

But for that he had 80-pound-test line with a 150-pound leader. This time he was using his standard setup for striped marlin--30-pound test with an 80-pound leader--when the swordfish caught him by surprise.

*

Kogler had been out fishing since the weekend, returning to Huntington Harbour briefly on Monday to drop off his wife, Michelle, and pick up Crilly, a neighbor. Kogler, 38, is a self-employed sign maker, which explains how he and his wife can fish three days a week during the marlin season from early summer through fall and why My Turn II has been the Balboa Angling Club’s top marlin boat three of the last four years.

The Koglers have caught 106 marlin in the last five years, and have released all but four. In ‘89, they caught 38. Once they caught seven in a single day.

“We do pretty well on the marlin but this hasn’t been a good year for local marlin,” Kogler said. “We’ve had only eight on the boat this year.”

Around 2 o’clock last Wednesday afternoon, as fires broke out from Ventura to the Mexican border and flames roared down Laguna Canyon, My Turn II was trolling with four jigs out. Crilly had caught a small marlin Tuesday, and on Wednesday they saw one jumping, but otherwise, 30 miles offshore, it was just a warm, sleepy day.

Suddenly, the swordfish popped up a few feet from the boat. Kogler threw the engine into neutral and leaped to grab a rod that already had a live mackerel “pinned” to the end of the line, swimming around in the bait tank.

“The fish was so close to the boat I didn’t want to take time getting a bigger outfit ready,” he said. “Steve winged it from the back of the boat first. The bait hit and (the fish) popped back up going by the bow, so I went up the side and said, ‘Hand me the rod.’ ”

A commercial swordfishing boat, perhaps led to the position by an air spotter, stood off a short distance, ready to harpoon the fish if Kogler and Crilly failed to hook it.

“The fish was just cutting across in front of the boat, so I threw in front of him,” Kogler said, “just an average little throw a couple of body lengths in front of the fish, and he just swam up to it and slammed it . . . smacked it with his bill twice and started rolling off.”

The commercial boat left. Crilly brought in the trolling jigs and cleared the deck. The fish dived deep under the boat, where it remained for most of the fight, sullen, circling, refusing to play the game.

“When we first hooked up, it was ice-cold beer time, a celebration,” Kogler said. “It’s hot, it’s calm, we’re hooked up to a swordfish. Then when it became dark, it was switch to coffee or hot chocolate. We went a long time without eating. I didn’t feel like having any food.

“Sometime around dark, I realized it was going to be a tough fish. We were testing the tackle from the beginning.”

Said Crilly: “Any time he’d (make a run) it was scary. You thought, ‘It’s going to break. It’s going to break.’ ”

Occasionally, when the wind parted the smoke, they could see the fires around Thousand Oaks to the north. The ash and insects came from the east. Sharks--blues and makos--came at dark, possibly attracted by the boat’s floodlight, the hum of the bait pump or the water coming out of the bait tank.

“We had a real shark problem,” Kogler said. “We were afraid they were going to scratch the line. Their skin is pretty abrasive.”

Crilly tried to poke them away with the seven-foot marlin-tagging stick, but they remained even after daylight, after Kogler had given up the rod.

“I pulled until about 4 in the morning,” Kogler said. “That’s when that fish broke my will. I knew I couldn’t catch the fish (alone).”

But he never considered letting it go.

Kogler, already awake for nearly 24 hours, turned the rod over to Crilly, who had managed only to cat-nap.

“But once I got on the rod, the adrenaline kicked in,” Crilly said. “I stayed on it until 8:30 or 9.

“I tried doing these erratic pumps (with the rod). Karl was in (the cabin) trying to take a nap, with his head on the table. I called, ‘Karl, I think he’s coming!’ Then he would turn on me and go back down. Karl said, ‘Don’t wake me up until you really think he’s coming.’ ”

They hadn’t seen the fish since they hooked it, but it made a brief appearance in the pre-dawn darkness.

“I got him to jump at about 6:30 in the morning,” Crilly said. “Right before it got light, he came up--’Karl, I think he’s up’--and he jumped, just one splash.”

They heard the splash, but it was too dark to see the fish. For a moment they thought it was the fish’s last hurrah--then it was gone again, back to the depths.

“Every inch of line you get on the reel is precious,” Kogler said, “then this guy would effortlessly blow us off another 50 yards.”

At one point, Crilly thought he almost had the fish. Then, “I’m cranking in and I saw a broken piece of line dangling and didn’t know what it was.”

It was half of the double line joining the leader to the main line.

“Karl leaned over and looked and (yelled), ‘There he is!’ He just swooped right past and went back down.

“I said, ‘I’ve got him tired now,’ and within two minutes I was down pretty close to the spool.”

With his 400 yards of line almost played out, Crilly urged Kogler to start the motor to chase the fish. Later, they saw that the line was getting frayed from jumping the roller guide on the rod whenever they pumped hard. It was time for new tactics.

“At 9 or 10 in the morning, we decided we’d better make him work harder,” Kogler said. “He was getting too happy being under the boat . . . too content. The pressure we were putting on him was straight up.”

So they moved the boat away, forcing the fish to resist laterally.

“We’d just keep the boat behind him and make him drag us around,” Kogler said. “When he started acting tired, we thought we’d see if we could lift him. The fish was doing slow circles around the boat.”

Kogler, on the bow, and Crilly, in the cockpit, kept handing off the rod to follow the fish. After a couple of hours of that, Crilly felt the fish quivering.

Finally, Crilly announced: “I think he’s dead.”

Crilly had cranked the fish to within 15 feet of the stern when they noticed the line was unrolling from its body and feared the hook might pop out of its mouth under pressure and the fish would sink. So Kogler slowly backed the boat down until they could gaff it, tail-rope it and drag it onto the swim step.

The time was 1:45 p.m. They hurried back to port with both a marlin and a swordfish flag flying. Nobody asked about the marlin. The blazes burned on.

*

The next day Kogler was cleaning up My Turn II on its trailer in the driveway in front of his house. The filleted carcass of the fish lay on the lawn, across the tips of about a dozen rods neatly aligned for cleaning and checking.

“We baited seven other swordfish this summer,” Kogler said. “All of them couldn’t have cared less. You’re shaking (with excitement) and they just swim off.”

Pound for pound, Kogler said, marlin “expel more energy (but for only) an hour or less. I got a 210-pound marlin in 15 minutes. They get more excited when they’re hooked. They jump around. A swordfish, it seems nothing bothers them.”

Said Crilly: “I’ve caught two blacks (marlin) in Cabo, and this is nothing like a marlin. We saw the sun change to the moon, and the moon to the sun.”

And the fires?

“We didn’t really know about them until we got in.”