Legendary Encounters |
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A legendary encounter would imply that the experience was somewhat out of the ordinary. So I recalled back to a trip in March of 1991, when my husband, Lenny, and I along with a group of journalists and captains took a 61-foot Cheoy Lee, Phoenix, from Golfito, Costa Rica on an exploratory trip to the Hannibal Bank off Coiba, Panama. It had been several years since Panama’s Club Pacifico had been closed, with only a few private boats venturing into those waters in the ensuing years. When we arrived at the boat, Lenny observed that the covering boards were much too high for my stand-up style of fishing, so we set up a ten-inch high pallet normally used for shipping bananas, which was placed in the center of the cockpit against the stern. The first challenge had been addressed, but this trip was to be fraught with many more. Fortunately, one of the members of our party worked for Lowrance Electronics and happened to have a fathometer in his suitcase. He rigged the transducer to the dive ladder, which was in turn lashed to the swim platform. None of us had been to the Hannibal Bank before and we were relying heavily on charts and needed the fathometer to pinpoint various drop-offs. Late on the afternoon of our first full day in Panama, I hooked a marlin of epic proportions. The billfish was leaping and spaying white foam as it made a steady run directly away from the boat, peeling off 600 yards of line from the screaming reel. The fish jumped so close to a small long-line boat that she drenched its occupants. We could see a puff of black smoke as their engine coughed to life in their attempt to get out of the way. The fish proceeded to go around one of their floats and back over another, scuffing the entire length of the fishing line. Back on board Phoenix, we were trying to cajole our boat into reverse. We had one captain in the cockpit running the boat, another in the engine room engaging the gears and applying throttle by means of a verbal relay system. It was a long relay as the entry to the engine room was forward of the saloon. To make it even more interesting, one cog of the verbal relay system spoke no English. Somehow it worked. You would hear the captain in the cockpit say, “Put the left engine in reverse,” and a minute later with a clunk, we’d start going backwards. We still at this time had no idea of just how large this mammoth fish was, even up to the point when I tipped the leader, making it a caught fish. Once the leader was tipped, we pulled away from the fish so as not to hit the line on the dive platform, and decided it would be a good time to try out the prototype full body harness we were working on. With steady pressure, I pumped her right back to the boat and Lenny wired her, all this just 18 minutes after hookup. Realizing that measuring a fish of her enormity in the water is a more difficult task than measuring a fish that can be held, we trimmed the measurements down to an even 12 feet by seven feet before figuring up the weight using the accepted formula – she was 1,270 pounds! The existing women’s 50 lb. class Pacific blue marlin record at that time stood at 716.7 pounds. But there would be no world record for me. My passion for billfish insured this marlin would live to breed another day.
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A Famed Angler Relives a Great Achievement
Shortly after getting underway, one of the stabilizers became hung up, which is where it remained for the balance of the trip. By the time we reached Panama, the fathometer had joined the ranks of the non-functioning, to be followed by the radar, and periodically the throttle and gear shift controls, along with the water-maker.
Only after the fish was wired and Lenny had her head out of the water did we begin to get some idea of her shear size. The fish was clearly spent from the exhausting run, so we dropped a line with a colored skirt back to get the length. The fish measured over 12 feet long from lower jaw to fork of tail and was better than seven feet in girth. 
