An Epic Fish Story That'll Send You Reeling

"It never jumped," which is unusual for a marlin, Bracher said, "and it stayed close to the boat, near the surface. We never lost sight of it the whole time."

Twenty minutes into the fight, Bracher backed the boat down hard, but Blount couldn't quite get his hand on the leader before the marlin made another run.

The idea was to get an official catch-and-release by touching the leader, then cutting the big fish free. In 16 years as a charter skipper, Bracher said he had brought only one marlin back to the dock, a blue that was gut-hooked and died in the fight. He's a strong advocate of catch-and-release and had no intention of killing this blue.

But circumstances conspired against him. Anyone who has fought a foul-hooked fish knows the difficulty. Instead of pulling against it head-on, you're pulling it in side-on. The weight seems to double and the toll on fish and fisherman can be terrible.

Drenched in sweat, Waltz, a building contractor by trade, pumped and reeled for an hour and a half. Blount steadily increased the drag setting to increase the pressure, hoping to shorten the fight. But sadly, by the time the fish was close enough for Blount to grab the leader again, the marlin was belly-up, dead.

It took six people to drag the great billfish through the Pelican's transom door. And there it lay, vanquished king of the tractless depths, brought down by an unfortunate turn of events.

Blount and Bracher took some measurements to confirm what they already knew -- that this was a spectacular trophy. The fish measured 130 inches, almost 11 feet, from the jaw to the fork of the tail, and was 74 inches in girth. "The odds of catching a fish like that, the way we did, and getting him in, it's like the lottery," Bracher said.

The skipper phoned the folks back at Oregon Inlet to let them know he was bringing a big one in, and hundreds of gawkers assembled at the Fishing Center. He backed into the slip where the gantry stands, where they used to hoist trophies back in the bad old days before catch-and-release, when folks brought in everything they caught. Strong hands manned the block and tackle to raise the giant up, tail-high, and get the weight.

It was 915 pounds, just 85 shy of the heralded 1,000-pound mark. Only three "granders," as 1,000-pounders are known, have ever been caught at Oregon Inlet, and the last one more than 900 pounds was five or six years ago, Bracher said.

What to do with all that fish? Marlin are not particularly good to eat, which is why almost all that are caught are released to fight again. The blue was too big to mount in one piece, said Waltz, so he's going to have it double-mounted. "We're redoing our house next year. I'm going to get the head mounted to go over the new fireplace and the tail will go somewhere else."

Waltz gives all credit to Bracher and Blount for the catch. It was his first marlin. "It was their quick response that made it happen," he said. "I didn't even know what kind of tackle I was using." Like Bracher, Waltz is sheepish about killing the grand fish, but reckons it couldn't be helped.

Catch of a lifetime?

"I'm going to win some points here and say no," Waltz said. "The catch of a lifetime was my wife, Stella," who snapped scores of pictures while her husband fought the great fish. "But it was definitely the fish of a lifetime."