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“I
had a Morgan Skiff 26, and it didn’t have a rod on it. I’d use
it to pick up girls. It was great. I’d go inshore, pick up a girl,
and take her for a ride,” he recalled with an ear-to-ear grin. But
his picking-up-girls days with the skiff ended with his discharge, and
it was back to fishing.
After
becoming a builder and general contractor, Amoroso began to earn local
respect as a fisherman while he owned a 1957 36-foot Klein, which was
built in Gerritsen Beach (in the Brooklyn borough of New York City) and
named, like all his boats, Marlin. I figured there had to be a
deep and mystical reason for all his boats bearing the name of this fierce
fighting fish. “Perhaps it was out of respect for a particular battle
between this angler and a pugnacious pelagic?” I thought. In straight-talk
Amoroso-style, he gave me the answer. “That was the name of my first
boat when I got it, and I didn’t feel like changing it,” he
said. Oh. Next question.
He
used his Klein to fish for all sorts of species, from shark to tuna to
marlin. “We were going to the canyons with fuel barrels that were
gravity-fed into the fuel tank,” he recalled laughingly, like a kid
who has gotten away with taking his parents’ car for a joy ride.
After all, when you carry barrels of fuel a couple hundred miles into
the ocean and come back, you’ve gotten away with something. Amoroso
added that marlin were plentiful, and bagging 40 to 50 tuna (not of the
giant variety) per trip was easy.
Working
on his trolling and drifting techniques, he turned to giant fishing exclusively
in 1968 and has kept with it ever since. He says he “just liked them.”
As the marlin is to Hemingway’s Santiago, so is the giant fish to
Amoroso. It’s his be all and end all.
So
for nearly 50 years, these giant fish have called Amoroso each season
to do battle, and oftentimes he has been the victor. He said, “We’ve
caught a lot of big fish.” Some of the pictures he showed me included
fish in the 600-, 700-, and 800-plus-pound range, with his personal best
coming in at more than 1,200 pounds. But he admits that even an experienced
angler like himself can be humbled. “If there’s a new way to
lose a fish, [my crew and I] will find it,” Amoroso joked. This may
be true, but as he shared with me some of his tricks of rigging, trolling,
and chunking baits and how to use a boat to tail-wrap a fish, I concluded
that he’s probably caught more than he’s lost.
At
73 years old, most fishermen would rather catch bass by the sandbar or
under a bridge, but not Amoroso. He admits that he doesn’t have the
energy he used to for those 3 a.m. starts but adds that he’s still
going to chase giants for a little while longer. “I’ll stop
fishing when I can’t get from here to there,” Amoroso told me
as he pointed to the deck and then to the flying bridge of his Hatteras.
In the short time I spent with Amoroso, I got the feeling he’ll always
find a way to “get from here to there.”
Oscar
Amoroso has battled giant fish like this one for five decades.
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