All Out for Banzai!

Somebody once said that the man who fishes for black marlin probably wears a size 44 coat and a size 4 hat. That is libel, of course. But the idea is that it takes brawn to catch one--and a kind of lunacy to try.

Not that the black marlin is the biggest game fish around; some sharks grow bigger. The black is just the fastest, strongest, smartest and meanest--and big enough too. The record for rod and reel is 1,560 Ibs., and even the babies--meaning 200 Ibs. or so--have bills like baseball bats. Golfer Sam

Snead, who would rather catch a marlin than lick Ben Hogan, says that going after blacks is "like hunting elephants." Another expert big game fisherman, S. Kip Farrington Jr., calls the black "the glamour boy of all fishes--and the most difficult to catch." Farrington should know: he once held the world record (a 1,135-pounder), and he has also spent 94 consecutive fishing days without boating a single marlin.

More of Everything. He should have gone to Pinas Bay. An isolated jungle inlet, 150 miles southeast of Panama City, Pinas (or Pineapple) Bay is the world's hottest marlin ground, better than Peru, better than New Zealand, Hawaii or the Bahamas. There, swarming around a bait-packed barrier reef seven miles offshore, are more different kinds of billfish, and more of each, than anybody has ever seen before: big Pacific sailfish in such profusion that fishermen consider them a nuisance, literally thousands of blue marlin, silver marlin, striped marlin and the lordly blacks.

Canal Zone fishermen have known about Pinas for years. The trip from Panama City took two days by boat, and it was camping out all the way. But that was until Ray Smith came along. A homespun Texas oil millionaire, Smith, 51, spent close to $1,000,-000 carving his Club de Pesca de Panama out of the rain forest and equipping it with all the comforts of home: his own amphibian plane service, air conditioning, plenty of ice and quinine water. He bought a fleet of ten sport-fishing boats, hired captains and crews from as far away as Jamaica. In the two years since Smith opened shop, hundreds of marlin have been pulled from Pinas Bay's waters, and Smith himself has one of five world records: a 186-lb. 8-oz. beauty, caught on 12-lb. test line--the equivalent, perhaps, of a 1.900-pounder on standard 130-lb. test. In one twelve-day span at Pinas last year, a marlin-mad Virginia couple actually boated 47 blacks, and Smith can prove that six out of every ten visitors land the marlin they came to catch.

Both Kneecaps. But they work for their prize. Not even a trout has a more jaundiced opinion of hooks. Blacks like live bait (a 5-lb. bonito does nicely), and they want it practically spoonfed to them. Some marlin will tail a bait for half an hour, only to decide that it isn't fishy enough; others give fishermen heart failure by enthusiastically grabbing the bait, then sourly spitting it out. But when the captain finally yells, "Sock him!", it's Katy bar the door. A few weeks ago at Pinas, an unprepared angler was yanked right over the stern of his boat, so hard that he broke both kneecaps.

Like a Polaris missile, the great fish roars out of the water, sometimes jumping 12 ft. or more, as he goes raging and tail-walking across the ocean. The hook usually pulls clear at this point, or the rod breaks, or the line pops with a crack like a .38 pistol. If the marlin does decide to stay and dance awhile, he rolls in the wire leader, smashes away at it with his bill, swims off on long curving runs to get a slack "belly" in the line. If that fails, in shallow water he will sometimes jam his bill tightly into the sand or cut himself off on a reef; in deep water he sounds, staying down until he dies--and not even a size 44 can reel a 1,000-lb. carcass up from 150 fathoms.

As a last resort, if the marlin is angry enough, he will even launch a banzai attack; virtually every boat in the Club de Pesca's fleet carries chunks of marlin bill embedded in its hull. Or the big black may simply outlast his tormentor. At Pinas Bay recently, a little lady from California battled a 900-lb. black marlin for nine solid hours, only to lose when darkness fell and crewmen were unable to gaff the fish.

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