Cabo Blanco is a fishing village in northwestern Peru, 3 km northwest from El Alto, Talara, Piura. It was famous in the past among big-game fishermen and today is a noted surf break. The village takes its name from the light coloured nearby mountains.
In the 1950s and 1960s, fishermen traveled to Cabo Blanco to hunt big marlin. Ernest Hemingway stayed more than a month at the famous "Cabo Blanco Fishing Club" and caught a 700 pound marlin while filming the motion picture based on his novel, The Old Man and the Sea. In 1953, Alfred Glassell Jr. caught the IGFA all tackle world record black marlin, weighing 1560 pounds.
In 1979, Peruvian surfer Gordo Barreda discovered the wave when he visited the village to check the surf in the area. The wave is a hollow powerful left and is reckoned the "Peruvian Pipeline", referring of course to the Banzai Pipeline inHawaii. Swell from Hawaii does in fact go on to reach Peru; in the 1990s the best way to get a surf forecast was to phone Hawaii and whatever swell they had would arrive about 5 days later.
The wave breaks over sand and rock, with the sand building up through summer and being washed away progressively by winter swells. The wave inspires a kind of fanaticism among surfers. Although there are only about 20 locals, crowds of surfers are drawn to the wave from Lima (700 kilometres south), and from around the world. With modern swell forecasts and the internet, it's easy to know when swell is on the way, and the surfers once there all pack into a single tight takeoff zone, despite other waves elsewhere in the area.
A concrete pier was built for local fishermen a few years ago, replacing a wooden one which was between Cabo and Panic Point and was destroyed by the sea. The proposal had been to build it right through the takeoff zone of the Cabo wave, ruining the wave, but also being a difficult place to build. Sanity prevailed, and the pier was built about 150 metres north, but it still chops off the tail end of the ride.
Cabo Blanco was used as the location of the film Undertow (Contracorriente), directed by Javier Fuentes-León. The movie was released in 2010.
ESTO ERA HACE 5 DECADAS CUANDO HEMMINGWAY
VENIA A PESCAR AL MAR DE GRAU
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2007
Hemingway's Peruvian fishing expedition
During the 1950s big game fishing was the rage and nowhere was it bigger than Peru.
A spot of the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast at Cabo Blanco was known worldwide as Marlin Boulevardand with good reason, dozens of records were set (and broken) here during that ten-year span, several which stand today including the biggest record of them all...
In 1953, club owner and Texas oilman Alfred Glassell snared a 14 feet, seven inches long 1,560 pound black marlin - the largest bony fish ever caught with a rod and reel. The record still stands today.
Eventually, of course, this would draw the biggest big-game fisherman of them all, Ernest Hemingway. And come he did, in April of 1956. A 34-day visit that is still recalled with pride in Peru.
It was 
a working holiday. Hemingway came with a film crew from Warner Brothers studios making the movie version of his book, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway did do a great deal of fishing during his stay catching three large marlin the biggest weighing 910 pounds. (Eventually they used footage of Glassell catching the record fish for the film.)
a working holiday. Hemingway came with a film crew from Warner Brothers studios making the movie version of his book, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway did do a great deal of fishing during his stay catching three large marlin the biggest weighing 910 pounds. (Eventually they used footage of Glassell catching the record fish for the film.)
A few months later he described the adventure for Look Magazine:
"We fished 32 days, from early morning until it was too rough to photograph and the seas ran like onrushing hills with snow blowing off the tops. If you looked from the crest of the sea toward the shore, you could see the haze of sand blowing as the wind furrowed the hills and scoured and sculptured them each day."
If you go to Cabo Blanco today there is very little left of the fishing club. The tiny town is made up of fishermen and their families, it's a population of just a few hundred. The one hotel sees the occasional family from Lima on the weekend during the year but it fills up with surfers in the winter (the little beach has a world-class left break).Everyone here remembers Hemingway though and every few months a Hemingway aficionado or two pass through asking about the writer. Locals point them to the Cabo Blanco Restaurant where the owner, Pablo Córdova, is the former bartender of the fishing club. He often will take the time to tell you about the days he worked there and how he served whiskey to the great writer who came to fish for the big fish half-a-century ago.
IGFA Sent Hemingway on a Mission
Hemingway in Bimini, 1937.
Courtesy of IGFA
The International Game Fish Association (IGFA) will soon be celebrating its 75th year as the fishing world's keeper of records and the international standard setter for proper game-fishing practices. Indeed, the IGFA once sent Ernest Hemingway to Kona just to check on Kona fishing methods in connection with a world record application. Here’s the story from the earliest days of the IGFA and the early years of "sport fishing," here.
Pioneering Kona skipper Charlie Finlayson invented a fighting chair that could have revolutionized big game fishing. Ernest Hemingway flew to Kona to see it, hated it, and complained to the IGFA about it. As a result of the author’s criticism, Charlie’s fishing chair ended up on the scrap heap of fishing history and the IGFA became wary about what was going on way out here in the middle of the Pacific.
The IGFA was in its infancy – barely two years old – in February 1941 when the famous writer made his only visit to Hawaii. He had stopped in Honolulu on his honeymoon with new bride Martha Gellhorn before heading on to China.
While Hemingway was in Honolulu, he met attorney Dudley C. Lewis, president of the Hawaii Big Game Fishing Association, IGFA trustee and later one of the six founders of the Hawaii International Billfish Tournament. Hemingway was involved in the IGFA at its beginning, and Dudley asked him to assist in verifying a Kona catch that Charlie had submitted to the IGFA for record consideration.
IGFA founders Michael Lerner and S. Kip Farrington Jr. had fished off Waianae with Dudley prior to its founding in 1939 and greatly respected his authority, fishing standards and sense of ethics.
Charlie had submitted a record application for an 815-pound “black marlin,” which had been caught by Robert Clapp, one of his charters aboard his boat.
Most marlin here were called “blacks” even though they were most likely blues, because the blue marlin was not recognized as a Pacific species back then. But blacks that big and bigger have been caught here. Setting aside the specific identity (it would not have mattered back then), Dudley had asked Hemingway to examine the remains of the fish, which had been sent over to Honolulu and stored in an ice house there. Hemingway would have been able to get a bare bones size estimate from the pieces on display – mostly the head, tail and skin – but nothing definitive.
What Hemingway saw interested him enough to fly over to Kona to get the story of the catch directly from Charlie’s mouth. So the bride and groom flew off for a two-day sojourn to Kona to do some sleuthing, fishing, sheep-hunting, and sight-seeing.
Whether Hemingway caught anything here seems never to have been recorded. Hemingway, himself, never wrote about his Hawaii fishing trip so it is unlikely that he did catch anything worth writing about. And we have to assume he fished with Charlie on one of the two boats that were part of Charlie’s charter operation.
But he wrote about Charlie’s fishing chair and did so with disdain, indignity and a sense of insult. He put all of his outrage in a letter to Francesca Lamonte, an IGFA founding member and associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History (Lamonte would figure prominently in another of Hawaii’s major sportfishing issues 20 years later but that is a story for later).
That letter, dated July 18, 1941 was sent by the IGFA and makes entertaining reading. If you have read much Hemingway as a writer of fiction, you can still sense some of his literary style in what amounts to a technical description of a piece of mechanical equipment.
You will understand it a bit more if you are familiar with the kind of seat competitive rowers use in racing competitions like the Olympics. The rower’s seat is on wheels in tracks so that he or she can apply maximum strength to the oar by driving the seat backward with the legs. The rower than readies for the next catch by raising the knees and sliding the seat back to the catch position.
Whether or not Hemingway had ever competed as an oarsman the rowing seat is what Charlie’s fishing chair brought to mind.
“The Clapp catch used a fishing chair built something like a rowing seat,” Hemingway wrote in his letter to Francesca. “The rod butt was in a socket which was a part of the chair. The rod and reel were attached to the chair the back of which would be rolled back and forth by the attendant.
“Being attached to the chair the pull of the fish would pull the chair and the rod forward. The guard or attendant would then pull the back of the chair back thus gaining line on the fish which the angler would only need to recover by turning the handle of the reel.”
And here is the part that got Hemingway’s dander up.
“The entire fishing device was designed to make it possible for anglers who had never fished before to catch big fish without being subjected to any strain on any part of their bodies except their reeling hand.”
Needless to say, Hemingway concluded that the seat unfairly advantaged the angler (isn’t that really the point? asks I), and no fish caught using it could be considered legal by IGFA standards. So no black marlin record for Robert Clapp.
I wonder what Hemingway would have said about the now generally accepted bucket seat harness as used in the now standard fighting chair? Without wheels, you get the same to-and-fro sliding effect by soaping the seat.
The difference with Charlie’s seat, of course, is the opportunity for a deckhand to do the work.
I recall seeing Charlie’s contraption long ago but can find no photo to show.
As for the legendary professor Francesca Lamonte, she popped up again in Hawaii fishing history in relation to another supposed “black” marlin.
Professor Lamonte believed there were no blue marlin in the Pacific and considered all record submissions from Hawaii to be blacks. After Capt. George Parker caught a 1,002-pound blue marlin in 1954 on a trip from Kona to Honolulu, he challenged Lamonte’s misidentification. She traveled to Kona, examined the Central Pacific blues up close and reversed her position.
If you want to find out more about Ernest Hemingway’s only visit to Hawaii –and, in particular, his intense dislike for Hawaiian hospitality – look online for a document entitled “Hemingway's Hawaiian Honeymoon.” Written by author Mark P. Ott, the 4,246-word document was published in the September 22, 1977 issue of The Hemingway Review.
DEL PERU, LA MARCA DEL FRIVOLO,
DEL INDIFERENTE
¿CONTAMINACIÓN?Más delfines aparecieron muertos en las playas de Lambayeque. El presidente de la Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de Puerto Eten, Francisco Ñíquen, indicó que esta vez se trata de unos 3000 ejemplares que fueron hallados, el último viernes, en el litoral de los distritos de Mórrope y San José junto a decenas de lobos marinos y a peces de diversas especies.
Pese a que estos hechos se presentan desde hace varias semanas, el jefe regional del Instituto del Mar del Perú (Imarpe), Édgar Barriga, dijo que recién hoy enviará una comitiva a Mórrope para verificar la situación.
Sobre el tema, Stefan Austermühle, director de la ONGMundo Azul, explicó que la muerte de los animales se debería a una rara epidemia causada por la contaminación del mar. “El vertimiento de los desagües en las aguas marinas contamina el lugar. También, el derramamiento de petróleo”, anotó.
Sin embargo, el presidente del consejo directivo de Imarpe, contralmirante Germán Vásquez, sostuvo que,según los estudios preliminares, los delfines no murieron por envenenamiento ni por alguna causa acústica, como lo indicó Carlos Yaipén, director de Ciencias de la ONG ORCA, quien insistió en la versión de que los mamíferos fueron afectados por la ‘burbuja marina’ que producen los sonares que lanzan las embarcaciones para la búsqueda de petróleo.
“La necropsia practicada a los animales revela que sus órganos no presentan daños”, expresó Vásquez. No obstante, afirmó que solo se ha realizado el examen a dos de los 3024 delfines muertos que estaban mejor conservados. “En 15 días se conocerán los resultados finales”, manifestó.LA MARCA DEL PERU, LA MARCA DEL FRIVOLO, DEL INDIFERENTE AL QUE NO LE IMPORTAN SUS ANIMALES, SU MEDIO AMBIENTE CON EL ANTIFAZ DE LA IGNORANCIA Y SIN RESPETO A SUS DERECHOS HUMANOS Y EL DE SUS CRIATURAS, Y ESPECIES ORIUNDAS. LA INDUSTRIA PESQUERA VIENE ENVENENANDO A LOS LOBOS DE MAR, LOS DELFINES, Y POR ENDE A TODOS LOS DE LA CADENA ALIMENTICIA HACE MAS DE 4 DECADAS POR QUE ELLOS COMPARTEN LA BIOMASA CON LA PESCA LOCAL NUNCA LE IMPORTO A LAS AUTORIDADES, AHORA DESAPARECE LA ANCHOVETA Y POR CONSIGUIENTE LAS OTRAS ESPECIES, Y COMO EL GOBIERNO NI SE INMUTA POR SU GRAN IGNORANCIA SE PERDERAN MILLONES QUE PODRIAN SER DESTINADOS PARA EL ECOTURISMO, SON UNAS BESTIAS
INVESTIGACIÓN
En tanto, durante su presentación en la Comisión de Medio Ambiente del Congreso, precisamente para tratar este tema, la viceministra de Pesquería, Patricia Majluf, señaló que se viene coordinando con un grupo de investigadores extranjeros la realización de un estudio para saber si algún virus marino estaría causando la muerte de los animales.
Al respecto, el viceministro del Ambiente, Gabriel Quijandría, indicó que, a fines de este mes,representantes de su cartera visitarán las instalaciones de la empresa BPZ (Tumbes) para inspeccionar los trabajos de exploración.
DATO
- Este año, tres mil 300 delfines han muerto en el litoral lambayecano, según el presidente de la Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de Puerto Eten, Francisco Ñíquen.
This is a very good blog and I like it a lot especially the Blue Marlin. This post is very well written. Thanks a lot for writing good quality posts.
ReplyDelete