Angler fights blue marlin for seven hours, then line breaks

day morning, Ols said. Much of the meat will get donated to the food bank.

“It’s been mostly draining with a bunch of [people asking] questions or [trying to] talk. I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and really get a game plan on some of these things. You don’t ever set up and prepare to win. Not in these type of tournaments,” Ols said.

On the other side of things, angler Doug Reynolds, who was fishing on the boat Ro Sham Bo, lost what may have been a qualifying blue marlin after a seven-hour fight.

Still, his fellow Ro Sham Bo angler, Rusty Shriver, caught a 215-pound bigeye on Thursday that won the team $1,753,478.

“It helped ease the pain some,” Reynolds said of the payout.

On Friday, the Ro Sham Bo was fishing just above the Baltimore Canyon when the blue hit at 8:30 a.m. and Reynolds took the reel.

After about 45 minutes they had the fish beside the boat, but it was still “green,” or full of energy, and took another run once a mate let go of the leader.

“When you’re fighting a fish like that, you think about the money,” Reynolds said. “You know that fish can be worth a lot of money, and everybody on the boat, everybody’s pulling for you and rooting for you.”

Reynolds said that was the best look they got of it and could tell that it was long and fat. He said it was a definite contender, but almost certainly below 1,000 pounds.

“Our fish was big. I mean, they knew it was big,” Reynolds said.

“I sat in that chair the whole time, I drank, I don’t know how many Gatorades, water, never went to the bathroom because I was just sweating. I mean, I was just sweating like crazy,” Reynolds said.

The crew saw the marlin jump several times a few hundred yards from the boat, but later on, the crew suspected the fish was dead for the last three or four hours of the fight.

“We just weren’t making any headway. We tried a bunch of different things to try to get the fish to the top,” Reynolds said.

One way this can happen is if the tail gets wrapped in the line, Reynolds said. When the marlin gets pulled backwards, it can’t breathe and dies. Although, they don’t know for sure.

The line eventually broke at the reel, which was followed by silence among the crew.

“You could hear a pin drop,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds said his legs felt like JellO and he could hardly stand up from the fighting chair.

Despite the loss, Reynolds said he plans to fish in the Mid-Atlantic, fiveday fishing tournament, which starts Monday.