A video of a crazy blue marlin catapulting into the cockpit of a large offshore trolling boat has logged more than 40 million views on TikTok since it was posted on July 14. The video is short — just 7 seconds — but it captures an action-packed moment that nearly resulted in serious injury or even death for a deck hand.
The crew of six anglers aboard the 68-foot-long Hatteras Jubilee out of Orange Beach, Alabama, were fishing in the Gulf of Mexico when they hooked a relatively small, but very active, blue marlin at about 4 p.m.
The video begins as the marlin is leaping beside the boat, then suddenly it catapults itself out of the water and onto the stern railing of the Hatteras.
One crew member, who’s trying to handle the marlin with the leader, is nearly struck by the marlin as it sails into the air. Instantly the thrashing, twisting marlin skids across the gunnel, passing the crewman with the leader. Slashing with its bill, the fish instead collides with another crew member, Thomas Arendall, whose back is to the crazed marlin.
Arendall is knocked hard to the boat’s deck, yelling and screaming as the muscular marlin continues its dance across the gunnel before finally falling back into the water. It’s a hair-raising close call: the marlin, which likely weighed between 100 and 200 pounds, nearly speared Arendall in the back.
Fortunately, Arendall only sustained a comparatively minor wound. The marlin ripped open the back of his shirt and its raspy bill raised a long, painful welt on his skin. Arendall said he never saw the marlin coming and had no idea what struck him.
The video ends as the fish falls back into the Gulf of Mexico, near the oil platform Delta House. The boat’s owner and crew declined interviews with OL, so it’s unknown if the marlin was lost or finally brought to the boat for the angler, Jon Houston Warr, who was in the fighting chair at the time.
This is just the latest high-profile brush with a thrashing billfish. Many dangerous mishaps have befallen billfish anglers over the years, and it just takes a quick search through YouTube to turn up videos of marlin catapulting into sportfishing boats.
In July 2022, 73-year-old Katherine Perkins of Arnold, Maryland, was injured by a sailfish that leapt into the boat while her companions were fighting it. Perkins was standing beside the center console when the fish’s bill struck her in the groin. Her fellow anglers performed first aid and returned her to shore, where she was hospitalized and treated.
Perkins is lucky to have survived. In 2000 a fisherman off the coast of Acapulco, Mexico, was stabbed through the abdomen by a marlin. Jose Rojas Mayarita drifted in the Pacific for several days (the exact number is disputed in different news accounts) before he was rescued by a U.S. government helicopter, according to Wired. He died from his injuries in the hospital.
Marlins are also plenty dangerous without their bills. In 1994, a veteran big-game fisherman “was snatched overboard by a blue marlin and dragged to his death in 10,000 feet of water” while serving as first mate during the Big Rock Marlin Tournament out of Morehead City, North Carolina.
Chris Bowie was wearing gloves and preparing to release “the 200-pound billfish … when his hands were ensnared in a 30-foot-long wire leader attached to the hook,” reported the Roanoke Times. The fish “catapulted Chris off the boat” and he was only able to get one hand free before the marlin dove.
Read Next: I Fought an 11-Foot Swordfish Solo from My 17-Foot Boat
Boating billfish is when the fight becomes most dangerous. Usually, anglers try to land marlin and sailfish quickly, so the fish recover quickly after release. But sometimes, as may have been the case aboard the Jubilee, sails and marlin are not quite ready to be drawn close for unhooking, and they leap into boats, still twisting, turning, and thrashing with their bills.
And less common these days but still worth mentioning are those legendary tales of aggressive swordfish attacking, and sometimes sinking, fishing boats by impaling their bills into fiberglass or wooden hulls.
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