If you want to hear about the day the guys on the fishing boat Sensation landed a giant marlin and danced to Tina Turner because they were sure they won $3.5 million, only to find out they didn’t, you need to know about with Ashley Bleau and the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in Morehead City, NC
Bleau, 45, is a self-described “Down East redneck” whose business attire is board shorts and sandals. Like many people on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast, he grew up hoping to own a boat one day, and last year he bought a beaut: Sensation, a 52-foot custom fishing boat with a cabin for relaxing and a bunk room downstairs. He used the boat to build his charter company, Sensation Sport Fishing.
In June, he entered it in the Big Rock tournament, joining 270 other vessels sailing for six days in hopes of winning millions in prize money and having their victory etched forever in the Big Rock fountain at Morehead City docks.
Since 1957, the Big Rock tournament, run by a nonprofit charity, has attracted sport fishermen from all over, including Michael Jordan, who competes on his fishing yacht, Catch-23.
“If you grew up here and care about fishing, Big Rock is your Super Bowl,” Bleau said.
Bleau’s captain is Greg McCoy, 56, who left his old job because the boat he was on belonged to the woman he was divorcing. The only dedicated member of McCoy’s crew is Darrin Cox, a 21-year-old in a camo hat who no one calls Darrin. He rode the Scooter.
Bleau found fishermen willing to pay for 24 shares in the boat at $3,013 per share, with different men assigned on different days.
The shareholders in Sensation agreed that the people on board for any prize catches would split 70 percent of the payout among themselves. Bleau, McCoy and Scooter will take 10 percent each.
The first boat to land a marlin weighing more than 500 pounds wins the Fabulous Fisherman prize, worth $739,500. The prize for catching the biggest marlin overall is $2,769,400. The potential haul, then, is $3.5 million if you win both prizes.
The Sensation plans to leave Morehead City at 5 a.m. on the morning of the tournament and find a place to drop its lines for a 9 a.m. start time. Under the rules, anglers will have until 3pm each day to hook a fish, and they can fight it as long as it needs to be reeled in. Boats must radio the tournament officials when they have a fish on the line. They also had to provide video of their fights with the fish later to confirm that the catch was legitimate and not fraudulent. Winners will have to take a polygraph test.
Many of the boats heading into the Atlantic have large, dedicated crews and fancy sonar technology that can find fish in the water below and lock onto it and follow it around.
Bleau’s boat was none of those things. To find marlin, McCoy relied on instincts and knowledge honed over 20 years at sea. Earlier this year, he and Scooter battled a 600-plus-pound bluefin tuna for 11 hours. They made it all the way to the boat, then the line snapped and the fish was gone.
“Broke my heart,” said Scooter.
On Big Rock’s first day, the swells were eight to 10 feet high, and four of the nine people aboard the Sensation spent most of the morning vomiting. Jordan’s Catch-23 didn’t even come up.
Three boats landed blue marlin that day, though only one weighed more than the minimum 400 pounds. On Day 3, Sea Wolf brought in a 408.1-pounder and Predator a 459-pounder. On Day 5, two more big marlin came in, including one from the Sushi boat at 484.5 pounds.
Sensation has just one day left — Saturday, June 17 — to catch a prize fish.
As the boat headed out to sea that morning, Scooter, not usually one for bold statements, made a prophecy: “At 2:13 pm, we will hook a marlin, and it will win.”
The morning passed quietly. McCoy looked for “rips,” locations where warm and cold water meet. They can create lines of sea grass and trash where baitfish like to hide. The fish are there, he thought.
Sensation drops lines and trolls. At the end of a particular line is a Black Bart Super Plunger with a blue and silver head and red and purple stripes.
Scooter’s arrived and left at 2:13 pm. Fish don’t wear watches.
But two minutes later, the line with Black Bart exploded on the reel. “A hit like you wouldn’t believe,” McCoy said later. The line ran from the rod with a screeching grunt. Something is on the line, and it’s big.
Bleau captured it all on video. Scooter took the baton to the shareholder who was then electing the chair – Bailey Gore, who owned a basement waterproofing company in Boone. Bare-chested and wearing sunglasses, Gore adjusted himself into a low squat to let his legs and back do the work.
When the marlin jumped, they knew they were onto something good. “If we can catch this fish,” McCoy recalled saying, “we’ll win Big Rock.”
After more than an hour of fighting, the fish made one final dive, down to 1,000 feet, trying to escape. Then the line became heavy and stopped moving. McCoy, who has caught about 15 blue marlin in his life, said the marlin likely had a heart attack and died. (Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, confirmed in an interview that a fish can die from exhaustion during a fight.) Their task now is to pull the fish without damaging the line. Hour after hour they winch it up.
The moment they boated it, Bleau said, they knew they had won. The fish was a blue-black monster, its mouth open in shock.
McCoy headed home, 24 knots to cover the 55 miles back to shore. He had Tina Turner and the crew dance and drink and take pictures with the fish. Bleau called his son. Scooter thought about the boat he would buy with his $350,000 cut — perhaps a white 28-foot center-console Contender, “something cool and fast,” he said. McCoy tells him he will introduce him to a financial planner so he can make the right investments.
They entered the docks in the dark around 11:15 pm Word of their big catch spread, and crowds packed waterfront restaurants and bars cheered them on as they motored into Morehead City. A large crowd filled Big Rock Landing.
Tournament weighmaster Randy Gregory, who is a marine biologist, got on the boat and inspected the fish. He quickly recognized a problem. The marlin had a bite on its tail, apparently from a shark, and a chunk of flesh was missing from its anal fin.
Under the rules, any fish that is cut during the fight will be disqualified. When the fish are hurt, the fisherman has an unfair advantage.
Ideally, “when you fight this fish, you fight 100 percent of the fish,” says Big Rock president Emery Ivey. in a Facebook video after the tournament. The guys at Sensation fought 100 percent of this marlin, minus a few chunks.
McCoy said he noticed “blemishes” on the fish, but said he’s seen worse in his career. “It never crossed my mind that it would be disqualified,” he said. “I may not be reading the rules properly, but I’ve read them a hundred times.”
Sensation’s win is in doubt. But out of respect for the crew’s efforts, Ivey said, officials chose to announce the weight: 619.4 pounds. It was the first fish over 500 pounds, and the largest total was 135 pounds. The crowd erupted in celebration, but tournament officials said they needed to talk more and send everyone home.
That night, they brought in additional biologists and experts to examine the fish. Their conclusion: It must have been bitten by a shark, or other predator, while it was hanging on the line.
The next morning, they announced that Sensation’s catch was disqualified.
“No one is pulling for those people harder than us on the Big Rock board,” Ivey said in an interview. “You know, they are hometown boats. Everyone knows who they are. But rules are rules, and to maintain the integrity of the tournament, we have to enforce the rules as they are written in our rule book.
Bleau officially protested the decision and retained legal counsel. Neither he nor Ivey would discuss any potential litigation. Bleau’s argument is that former Big Rock marlins came in with bites and still count as qualifying results. Some people point to the 2019 winner, a 914-pound marlin caught by the fishing boat Top Dog, as an example. But Ivey said the fish were only cut after the fight, when the fishermen were pulling them into the boat.
Bleau has a lot of support in Morehead City. His daughter made T-shirts introducing Sensation as the Big Rock People’s Champion and sold over 1,000 of them.
It turns out that losing $3.5 million to a poorly timed shark bite is the kind of thing that makes fishermen examine their true principles.
“I was never about the money,” McCoy said. “I wanted my name on that Big Rock fountain. Ever since I started fishing here. And I thought I did.”
The other day, Scooter was talking to a friend on another boat, saying that it felt like he won the tournament.
“But you didn’t win,” said another man in the boat. He was part of the Sushi crew that caught the winning marlin.
Scooter shrugged and said, “We caught a bigger fish.”