Ocean City, Maryland calls itself the white marlin capital of the world, and it says so loudly enough that the matter is considered settled in town. The fish themselves live sixty miles out, along the canyons where the continental shelf falls away, and in September they stack up on the warm edges before heading south. Getting to them means leaving the dock at three in the morning, an hour that should only be used for leaving a wedding.
We ran out with a captain I will call Skip, because he asked me not to use his name in anything that included a count. His mate, a college kid named Dalton, rigged ballyhoo the whole ride by headlamp, dozens of them, lined up in a tray of ice like silverware. By sunrise we were in blue water over the canyon wall, lines out, teasers skipping, and Skip was up on the bridge staring at the spread like a man watching a pot.
White marlin do not crash a bait. They appear behind it, a brown shape with lit up blue fins, and they whack at it with the bill like someone testing a melon. Dalton yelled left long. My job was to pick up the rod, drop the bait back in free spool, count to a number no two captains agree on, then push the lever up and reel. I counted to five. Skip, from the bridge, informed me that the number was seven, along with a few other numbers.
The second fish I fed properly. The circle hook found the corner of its jaw, the line came tight, and sixty pounds of marlin went up into the air and stayed there for what felt like most of the morning, greyhounding across the wake with its whole body out of the water. A white is not a big marlin. On twenty pound tackle it does not need to be. It took fifteen minutes to get the leader to Dalton’s glove. He popped the hook out and the fish swam off, glowing blue and deeply offended.
We raised nine that day and released four, which Skip described as a fair day and Dalton described as the best of his life, and I suspect both were being honest. On the long run home Dalton ran a release flag up the outrigger for each fish, upside down, the way it is done. I asked Skip if my count of five had cost us the first one. He said no, the fish was probably just not hungry. It is the kindest lie anyone has told me in Maryland.
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