“Jesus God Almighty,” said a veteran captain from Fort Lauderdale one night in a local hotel bar, “you wouldn't believe the things I've seen these fools do!” He laughed, but the sound was nervous and his body seemed to shudder as the memories came back on him. “One of the people I work for,” he said, “has a wife who's just flat-out crazy.” He shook his head wearily. “I don't want you to get me wrong, now -- I love her dearly, as a person -- but when it comes to fishing, goddamn it, I'd like to chop her up and toss her out for the sharks.” He took a long hit on his rum and Coke. “Yeah, I hate to say it, but that's all she's good for -- shark bait and nothin else. Jesus, the other day she almost killed herself! We hooked a big sailfish, and when that happens, you have to move pretty fast, you know -- but all of a sudden, I heard her screaming like crazy, and when I looked down from the bridge, she had her hair all tangled up in the reel!” He laughed. “Goddamn! Can you believe that? She almost got scalped! I had to jump down, about fifteen feet onto a wet deck in a bad sea, we were wallowing all around -- and cut the whole line loose with my knife. She came within about ten seconds of having all her hair pulled out!”

Few anglers -- and especially winners like Frank Oliver -- agree with the pros' 90-10 split. “It's basically a teamwork situation,” says Oliver, “like a chain with no weak links. The angler, the captain, the mates, the boat -- they're all critical, they work like gears with each other.”

Well. . . maybe so. Oliver won the tournament with 28 sailfish in the three days that counted. But he was fishing alone on Sun Dancer -- a boat so lavishly outfitted it could have passed for the nautical den in Nelson Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue apartment -- and with the Arnold Palmer of sport fishing up on the bridge. Most of his competition was fishing in twos and threes on charter boats they were assigned to at random, with wild-tempered, contemptuous captains they'd never even met before yesterday morning.

“Fishing against Cliff North is bad enough,” said Jerry Haugen, captain of a stripped-down hulk of a boat called Lucky Striker, “but when you have to go against North and only one angler, with everything set up exactly the way he wants it, that's just about impossible.”