Before the Strike - CAPT. PETER BRISTOW

After nearly six decades, Australian skipper Capt. Peter Bristow is still on the hunt for giants. His amazing career will go down in the record books as the captain who has caught more big blacks and blues than anyone on the planet. He spent three decades working the Great Barrier Reef catching hundreds of huge black marlin, putting 52 over 1,000 pounds on the deck.

- John Ashley

In 1996, he decided to shift his talents to the Atlantic Ocean, working out of the Portuguese island of Madeira, where the seas are calm and the fish are big. At the ripe old age of 84, he's still running a charter boat.

M How did you get involved in fishing?

I was born in Brisbane in 1938 and moved to Stradbroke Island in southern Queensland in my teens. I got involved in all kinds of angling before getting a job on a commercial fishing trawler. I enjoyed the physical, offshore boatwork for a couple of years before I heard about the giant black marlin that were being caught off Cairns. One was a world-record grander taken on Sea Baby by Capt. George Bransford in 1966. I had to go to Cairns to investigate.

M What was the first job you got?

I was with a group of guys from the Moreton Bay Game Fishing Club, so we went to Cairns and chartered a vessel called Marlan, skippered by Alan Collis. After a week of fantastic black marlin fishing, I managed to secure a job on Marlan for the following season. The size of the fish I experienced out on the reef changed my life forever. That was 1967, and there were only six boats in the entire fleet.

M Was the lack of charter vessels the reason you built your own boat?

It was. I started building the 38-foot Avalon in '69, and she was finished for the start of the 1970 season. She was a great sea boat and could raise giant marlin one after another. In the '73 season, we caught 192 blacks up to and over 1,000 pounds. Most were tagged, and quite a few big fish were weighed. Those numbers in a two-and-a-half-month season have never been beaten.

M Who was your most influential heavy-tackle angler?