Ozzie the Marlin Wizard : If You Want to Catch a Really Big Fish at Cabo San Lucas, Oswaldo Marquez Is the Skipper Who’ll Help You Find It

It wasn’t any hotter than usual in this sun-baked region, but for George Rafalovich it was practically unbearable.

His head throbbed, his back ached and he was drenched in sweat.

The worst part, though, was the way time dragged on. Minutes to hours . . .

“It was just a big stubborn fish that took a long time,” Rafalovich said of that memorable day, Oct. 7, 1979.

It was a day during which Rafalovich, now 66, made history.

When he finally won the four-hour war, against fish and failing equipment--the fighting chair had broken loose from its fitting and Rafalovich, unable to use the rod-holder, had to battle the fish with the rod-butt in his gut--he had landed a blue marlin that tipped the crude Cabo scale at 1,110 pounds.

It is believed to be the largest marlin ever caught off Land’s End. More than 15 years and thousands of marlin later, only a few others have even come close.

And although Rafalovich gets credit for landing the beast, he is the first to point out that not all the credit should go to him.

After all, it wasn’t Rafalovich who found the fish, feeding in the deep, blue water 2 1/2 miles off the Finisterra Hotel.

It was Oswaldo Marquez, known around town simply as Ozzie.

In many respects, Ozzie is not unlike the dozens of other small-boat skippers trying to reel in a living where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific.

His fleet consists of a single panga , a well-kept 23-footer equipped with a canopy for shade and state-of-the-art tackle, but a panga nonetheless.

But Ozzie is not your typical Cabo San Lucas pangero .

After all, none of the others have ever eaten monkey brains.

“The brain is very good,” Ozzie insisted in all seriousness one recent afternoon, standing beside his boat at the docks beneath the Plaza Las Glorias Hotel.

But then, none of the others ever had a chance to taste the, uh, delicacy. They didn’t grow up in the jungles of Peru. Ozzie did, hunting deer and monkeys, wrestling snakes and battling the monsters that prowled the depths of the mighty Amazon.

“Over there in the Amazon River, I was catching 300-, 350-pound catfish,” Ozzie said. “They can eat a kid, you know.”

So can boa constrictors. Ozzie claims to have killed a 36-footer on one of his boyhood journeys into the jungle.

“I also hunted tapir, which we used to go to sell to make a living, or I would fish.”

That, it seems, is what Ozzie does best.

Wealthy U.S. yacht owners, most of whom take their fishing very seriously, have requested Ozzie’s services since he arrived in 1960.

Rafalovich didn’t catch his monster marlin from a panga . He was fishing aboard a big boat called Big Dog when the fish struck. The boat was owned by Fred Cameron, a widely-known angler from the United States who fished exclusively for giant marlin.

Ozzie, driving Cameron’s boat, found one, taking the water conditions and baitfish activity into consideration and putting the Big Dog directly in the path of the big blue. The marlin ate a 15-pound dorado and the fight was on.

Rafalovich said he doesn’t remember much about the fight, only that “it was just a big ornery fish that wore me out.”

He also said that without Ozzie, whom Rafalovich remembers as an “immensely talented skipper who does everything right,” the catch of a lifetime probably never would have been possible.

When Ozzie, now 57, arrived in Cabo San Lucas, there was no Highway 1 or commercial airport, only a dirt airstrip for the Hacienda Hotel. The only way in was by private plane, and Cabo was almost exclusively a haven for the rich and famous.

“I took John Wayne fishing with me,” Ozzie said. “Bing Crosby used to come here. I took fishing a lot of these big guys, like lawyers, senators, even (evangelist) Jim Bakker.”

Tom Lowey, 73, a retired San Diego area auto dealer, started bringing his yachts in 1960 and happened to meet Ozzie.

“I brought my first boat in here and he comes in looking for a job as a deckhand,” Lowey said after a recent day of fishing aboard his 55-foot sportfisher, El Gato. “And very quickly I realized that I was outmatched, and I figured, ‘Well, I think he’d make a better captain than he would a deckhand.’ ”

Ozzie has since been at the helm of all nine of the yachts Lowey has had over the years.

“I’ve known him for 24 years,” Lowey said. “I used to come down here and he’d be teaching me Spanish and I’d be teaching him English, and that was our bit. And then one day he says to me, ‘Mr. Tom, you know, I need to thank you. You work so hard, so I can enjoy your boat.’ ”

And Lowey, in turn, has enjoyed some of the best fishing Cabo has to offer, catching more big marlin than he can remember.

“In my personal opinion, he’s the best fishing captain, fishing captain in Cabo San Lucas,” Lowey said. “He can look at the water and tell you what’s out there. He knows when the fish feed.”

Earle Johnson, 62, a friend of Lowey’s from Incline Village, Nev., recalled one day years ago aboard El Gato when Ozzie put him in the middle of dozens of feeding broadbill swordfish, a highly-prized species seldom encountered these days.

Johnson hooked one after another of the powerful billfish, fighting five and eventually landing two or three. The day was so hectic he wasn’t exactly sure.

“I had never caught a broadbill all my life,” Johnson said. “I hooked them but I never caught one until that day. And I was just hung up all day long.”

Said Lowey: “That day I put in my log, ‘Today we watched Earle Johnson fish.’ ”

Thanks, they say, to Ozzie.

Ozzie himself claims to have taken giant marlin nine days in a row, a remarkable feat.

“I got one every day, 500 pounds, 400 pounds, 600 pounds, 700 pounds, 830 . . . nine fish in a row. It was one of those weeks,” he said.

Ozzie loves to fish. Always has.

When it came time to move from Peru--”I was not making much of a living there,” he said--he joined the crew of a transport ship and worked for six months loading and unloading various goods throughout South America.

“I had my line in water all the time,” he said. “It was a big rope; I took and made fishing line from a rope. We were coming 7 knots and once in a while I would get a strike and told them stop (so I could reel in). But they don’t want to stop. But I pulled in my dorado anyway with that heavy rope. . . . I said, ‘The hell with them.’

“Then when the captain would smell that fish frying and cooking he was the first one down.”

Ozzie got tired of loading and unloading and, after being offered a job as a commercial diver in Santa Barbara, he jumped one ship and began his journey in another up the Pacific coast.

Cabo San Lucas was as far as he got.

“There were all the fish you wanted and not much people,” he said, sounding nostalgic.

But the people were friendly and life was simple, the way Ozzie liked it. He got some work as a diver, collecting various specimens for the new Sea World marine park in California.

But it was the variety of fish in the blue water offshore that enthralled him: Giant blue marlin taking leaping dorado in mid-air. Huge schools of tuna crashing the surface. Slender wahoo cutting across the sea.

Ozzie dreamed of being the captain of a sportfisher.

And although he has only the one panga , Ozzie, it seems, has realized his dream.