Word: marline
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...scoured the sleeping town for a six-pack of cold beer. Half an hour later, he is aboard a motorboat, headed for the Jack Spot, a ten-square-mile expanse of shoal water with one simple claim to fame: there, each summer, congregates the densest concentration of white marlin in the world...
Fish Out of Water. Compared with its giant kin, the Atlantic blue marlin and the black marlin, the white seems almost pygmyish. The biggest white mar lin ever boated weighed 161 lbs., as against rod-and-reel records of 810 lbs. for the blue and 1,560 lbs. for the black. But for fishermen who cannot afford to chase the blues to the Bahamas or the blacks to Panama, the silvery, long-billed white marlin is a mettlesome substitute. Pound for pound, it is one of the sea's most exciting and annoying game fish. Wily and wary...
...hard to get a white marlin on the hook, it is even harder to keep it there. An angry white marlin can swim at 60 m.p.h. In its strong, tenacious struggle to throw the hook, it often thrusts out of the water 20 times or more in "tailwalking" jumps and long "greyhounding" leaps, sometimes lunges at the stern of a boat with enough force to impale a careless fisherman on its bill...
Flags on the Rigging. The white marlin's poundage makes it a light-tackle fish by strict fishermanly standards, but charter-boat skippers usually load their reels with 50-lb. test line to give their clients a fighting chance. Even so, the big ones often get away. But there are days when everything goes right, when the marlins gobble every bait in sight, when the Jack Spot boils with leaping fish, and blue and white flags flutter gaily on the rigging of the boats-one flag for each marlin caught...
Once the happy fisherman is ashore and his catch is measured and weighed, other kinds of fish swarm around him. He pays the captain ($110), throws in a tip ($10), poses for a photograph with his marlin ($2), gets loaded up with certificates and buttons attesting his fortitude and skill (free). Then, while he is weak with pride, a stranger comes up to him, bubbles congratulations and whips out an order pad. "Guess you'll be wanting it mounted," he says...