To this end, he had hired one of the world's top fishing captains -- a speedy little cracker named Cliff North -- and turned Sun Dancer over to him on a year-round basis. North is a living legend in the sport-fishing world and the idea that Oliver would hire him as his personal captain was not entirely acceptable to the other anglers. One of them explained that it was like some rich weekend duffer hiring Arnold Palmer to shoot the final round of the Greater Cleveland Elks golf tourney for him. North lives on the boat, with his wife and two young “mates,” who do all the menial work, and during the ten months of the year when Oliver's not around, he charters Sun Dancer out to anybody who can pay the rate. All Cuff has to do -- in return for this sinecure -- is make sure Oliver wins the three or four fishing tournaments he finds time to enter each year.

Thanks to North and his expert boat handling, Frank Oliver is now listed in the sport-fishing record books as one of the world's top anglers. Whether or not Oliver would win any tournaments without North and Sun Dancer is a subject of widespread disagreement and occasional rude opinion among sport-fishing pros. Not even the most egotistical anglers will deny that a good boat and a hot-rod captain to handle it are crucial factors in ocean fishing -- but there is a definite division of opinion between anglers (who are mainly rich amateurs) and pros (the boat captain and the crews) about the relative value of skills.

Most of the pros I talked to in Cozumel were reluctant, at first, to speak on this subject -- at least for the record -- but after the third or fourth drink, they would invariably come around to suggesting that anglers were more of a hazard than a help and, as a general rule of thumb, you could catch more fish by just jamming the rod into a holder on the rear end of the boat and letting the fish do the work. After two or three days on the boats, the most generous consensus I could get from the pros was that even the best angler is worth about a ten percent advantage in a tournament, and that most are seen as handicaps.