A New Zealand game fisherman found himself wrestling with a giant catch on Friday, as he hunted for marlin off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
Video shot from his charter vessel, the Moana III, showed the battle Douglas Perry had, to land the fish, a black marlin, weighing 544 kg.
"It was pretty awesome," said Mr Perry told journalists on Monday.
"We saw it hit the bait and then it started to pull the line out and oh, very, very powerful and a real experience," he added.
The boat's skipper, Daniel McCarthy, has been organising game fishing trips in the area for more than 20 years and said Friday's catch was special.
"Yeah, it's certainly right up the top of the spectrum there. You don't see too many fish of that calibre. We catch a lot of large marlin but you only see one every now and again that's sort of in the 1200 pound range so it was a pretty special day," he said.
McCarthy said the monster was tagged with a satellite tracker as part of an on-going programme researching giant marlin.
"Well, we are running a bit of a research programme. We tag and release 99.9 per cent of the marlin caught in our marlin fishery in Cairns and they provide an enormous amount of research for this magnificent species that travel all around the world," Mr McCarthy said.
The pair said as they could not reel the fish in, they backed the boat up to it.
