Big Fish

At Bisbee’s Black & Blue, modern-day Ahabs cast for the Moby Dick of marlins in the Sea of Cortez

By Bucky McMahon
Photos by Joe Pugliese


Boats in Bisbee’s billfish tourney round the point in Cabo San Lucas harbor after a shotgun start


A greenback offering to Neptune

JUST AFTER DAWN, out beside the signature sugarloaf crags of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, the 850 official entrants of the 27th annual Bisbee’s Black & Blue Marlin Tournament prowl the bay, everyone trying to catch tuna for live bait. It’s a sportfisherman’s fever dream, a crazy quilt of 166 crisscrossing wakes, bristling rods, and snaking lines. And with some $4 million in prize money at stake, the world’s richest billfish tourney gives new meaning to the phrase “economies of scale.” For some, the event is a chance to strike it rich with one lucky fish. For others, it’s about being the big fish in yet another pond.

The boats themselves tell the tale: You’ve got guys casting sardines off the backs of yachts big enough for helipads. You’ve got hopefuls in day boats smaller than the dinghies aboard the hulking mini-liners. And making up the multi-million-dollar median are dozens of Hatterases, Mikelsons, and Vikings in the 60-foot range, looking every bit as muscular and dangerous as their quarry. Powered down and rumbling, these billfish battlewagons make a deep-throated gargle as they suck in and spit out green bay water, tingeing the salt air with diesel fumes, hinting at the fury about to be unleashed on the Sea of Cortez.

It’s heady stuff for the once humble Black & Blue, a fishing tournament that remains, at heart, a bar bet writ large. Back in 1982, when the first, informal Bisbee’s hit the seas, it was just Newport Beach, California, tackle-shop owner Bob Bisbee and his cronies, who’d been coming to Cabo since it was the proverbial sleepy fishing village, in the early sixties. Bisbee was a local legend for driving from Newport Beach to Cabo—1,100 miles of highway—some 20 times a year. One night at the Mar de Cortez bar, he tossed out a new challenge to a handful of friends, telling them to put up or shut up. They put up: a total pot of ten grand in cash, slapped on the table, biggest billfish takes all. Now in his seventies, Bob will somewhat sheepishly recollect that he won that bet. Won the next bet too, the following year, when the pot swelled to accommodate 13 boats, and Bob Jr. captained for his old man.

“Winning two years in a row seemed a little self-serving,” Wayne Bisbee says, explaining why the family segued from winning to organizing the tournament. Since taking over the director’s job from his dad, Wayne has foiled a kidnapping plot and been thrown in jail for disqualifying a local angler who failed a lie-detector test after brazenly trying to pawn off a marlin purchased from a long-liner as his own. He has also seen the three-day tourney grow from a gritty affair with cash tossed haphazardly on a hotel mattress to a world-renowned clash of sportfishing titans—and the town of Cabo San Lucas turn into, well, the woozy Cabo of Cabo Wabo, with golf courses and gated communities. But the tournament brings in serious money for the town, and a winning fish can change lives, especially those of little-known local captains and crews.



When the prize fishing begins, only the crazy are still fooling around.

Small planes circle and choppers cut the air, and Wayne Bisbee twangs over the radio: “Back it up, cap’ns!” The armada somehow masses behind the start line without collision. Aboard the Outlaw, a 60-foot cruiser that’s half cigarette boat, half oceangoing stretch limo, Señor Somebody Locally Important steps onto the bulging prow and takes aim at the brightening sky with a flare gun. Pop! The sea seethes, the air roars, and for one cartoonish moment nobody seems to move. Then the front-runners rise up onto their bow wakes and blast out of the bay, the muscle boats hitting 40 knots in seconds flat. Wave after wave, they charge forth. Half a million horsepower throttles the sea.

The 25-foot day boats are getting launched in Class I rapids. They burst through standing waves in explosions of spray, everybody fanning out Broadway-musical style in the greatest powerboating display on the planet. Among the contenders are anglers from 15 countries and 47 U.S. states, a famous Japanese wrestler, a former KGB general, and a guy in an Elvis suit. There are dead-serious boats whose crews will scan the horizon nonstop with $5,000 Fraser-Volpe gyro-stabilized binoculars, and boats on which an interpretive fish dance, fueled by margaritas, is the only real game plan. While the party-hearty boys hope to cross paths with big, dumb marlins, the pros bet on live tuna in the 10-to-20-pound range, kept fresh for up to 15 hours in mechanized “tuna tubes” that massage them with high-powered spray.

Among the best-equipped, most meticulous and dedicated fishermen in the melee is Anthony Hsieh, captain of Team Bad Company, which won last year’s Black & Blue, with its world-record purse of $3.9 million. Hsieh, 42, who emigrated to the U.S. from China when he was eight and bootstrapped his way to fortune with his innovative online mortgaging businesses, now focuses full-time on pursuing monsters of the deep. This year’s Bad Company “dream team” is aboard the two boats Hsieh has entered—55- and 60-foot custom Hatterases, valued together at $2 million. The team includes legendary West Coast captain Steve Lassley, the “professor” of electronic fish-finding technology, and team coach Kevin Nakamura, the self-described “utility guy,” who has boated dozens of 1,000-pounders around the world.

But all of Bad Company’s careful preparation appears to have been scotched by Tropical Storm Kiko, which spared Los Cabos but scrambled the thermoclines. It’s basically a clean slate out there now. Some of the contenders even have the same winning DNA: Hsieh and company are aboard the 55-foot Hatteras they won on in 2006, which has had a $500,000 makeover. Rival Team Falcone is also fishing off of a former Bad Company boat, sold by Hsieh a decade ago. Which, all things being made equal by the storm, poses the question: Is it the boat or the boys? Or is winning serious cash in the three-day contest a matter of dumb luck?

AROUND NOON, the Missing Lenk, out of Newport Beach, California, steams into the Cabo San Lucas marina with the first serious fish of the tourney. The leviathan is wrestled from the transom and onto a trolley. Boat owner Dale Lenk, a renowned SoCal dune-buggy racer, and the rest of his sunburned anglers follow behind, running a gantlet of TV and cell-phone cameras. The fish is roped and hoisted: a 591-pound blue marlin. Grandpas shoulder grandsons to ooh and aah. The Ferrari of game fish, mouth agape, pectorals flaring, betrays perfect design—even as it drips blood into a plastic bucket. It’s bound for the DIF, Mexico’s welfare department, to feed the needy. But before it goes, beautiful mamacitas in bikinis step in to pose with the monster, as if to say, Here are power and money, man’s cunning and nature’s genius: Why not some pulchritude too?

“It’s better than sex!” effuses angler Mike Powell, a first-time Bisbee’s competitor who fought the fish for 50 minutes but ultimately credits the flawless piloting of Missing Lenk’s captain, Bryan Adams.

Indeed, considering the billfish’s tremendous fighting strength, skilled cooperation between captain and angler can mean the difference between a wistful fish story and a trip to the bank. (Missing Lenk’s blue marlin will earn $461,963, for second place.) A good tournament boat features multiple steering stations so that the captain never needs to turn his back on the fish, ever ready to throw the boat’s horses and tonnage into the fray. A great tournament boat adds a retractable sonar scope, extra tuna tubes, four luxurious staterooms, and a pop-up big-screen plasma TV in the stylishly appointed saloon. Far from the old adage that seafaring is like being in jail with a chance of drowning, competing aboard these high-end power yachts is like hanging in a suite at the Four Seasons with the chance of winning millions.

But whether you’re on a leather lounger watching ESPN while your deckhands guard the lucky $50 bills wound into your reels, or you’re tirelessly scanning the horizon from the tower like Anthony Hsieh, once you’ve got a serious fish on the line it’s just predator versus predator in an often epic struggle. Bisbee’s veterans still talk about the 1990 tourney, when actor Willie Aames fought a 461-pound marlin for 21 hours. Wrapped in the line, the fish dragged the boat some 15 miles, all through the night, until food, water, and fuel were gone. Hands completely blistered, Aames finally landed the infamous $250,000 fish when both were utterly spent. Alternatively, the brute may take the fight to the boat, arriving green at the transom with spike slashing, requiring a skillful cudgeling of the brainpan.


Bob Bisbee, founder of Bisbee’s Black & Blue

Still, you gotta have luck on your side. And, maybe, a lucky boat. Late in the afternoon of the second day, the first million-dollar fish is paraded to the scales, and it’s from the Bertram 54, still called Bad Company—“the other Bad Company” to most insiders—with its crew of rookies making the triumphal march. Team Falcone may be greenhorns on the circuit, but led by the fetching socialite and philanthropist Sonia Falcone, they’ve bet like old pros. In addition to the basic $5,000 entry fee, they’ve cowboyed up for all the optional daily pots, a $63,000 “across the board” wager that garners their 539-pound blue marlin a payout of $1,421,752—the second-largest in tourney history.

“It’s a big blessing from God,” declares the winning angler, Brian Weisheim, Mrs. Falcone’s nephew. “But we were in a pretty good boat.” For a sport rife with superstition—bananas on board, for instance, are taboo—having a boat marked by Hsieh reach the podium two years in a row is too weird to be mere coincidence. Conspiracy nuts will note that in passing from millionaire to millionaire (in this case, from Hsieh to Falcone, a former Miss Bolivia and the wife of arms dealer Pierre Falcone), the Bertram has somehow hung on to its billfish juju. After tipping the captain and crew a total of $213,000, Falcone donates the rest of the prize—about $1.2 million—to the town of Cabo.

For the men of the Missing Lenk, however, luck is not a lady, just a tease. After watching their 591-pounder hold up as the biggest fish of the tournament for most of three days, they’re burned in the last 15 minutes when the Angel and the Badman II brings a 620-pound blue to the scale, for a biggest-fish payout of $734,415. As for the original Bad Company, the highest-earning sportfishing team in history, with more than $6 million in prize money, the 27th Bisbee’s turns out to be a riches-to-rags story. Still, a post-tourney raffle earns the boys a free entry to next year’s tournament—not that they would have skipped it. Hsieh, who fishes more than 180 days a year (yet will kill as few as five big marlins in that span), is disappointed but by no means daunted. He takes comfort in his routine, packing away his 20-plus rods, each in its designated place, helping the crew hose and wipe down the Hatteras 60 battlewagon until it’s spotless. This is his office.

“I’m a businessman,” he admits. “But at heart I’m just another guy in a T-shirt and dirty shorts. I’m a fisherman.”