FS: How long did you work as a long-liner out of Ft. Pierce?

LONGLINER: About ten years.

FS: What kind of boat did you work on?

LONGLINER: They were fiberglass, one was a 60-footer, one was a 45-footer. But there were three or four boats I worked.

FS: What did you fish for?

LONGLINER: Swordfish was our money fish, and tuna was our money fish. That was our main high dollar fish that we would catch. And also dolphin-mahi mahi - we caught a lot of that. And when shark was in season, we could bring that in, too. But we caught everything from marlin, sailfish, turtles, whales, big monster squid. You name it, we caught it.

FS: Were there certain times of year or places where you’d catch more marlin?

LONGLINER: Pretty much anywhere we’d fish. We were always catching marlin and sailfish. It seemed like we caught more of ‘em when we were fishing in the Straits. There would be days when we would catch, God, twenty, thirty sailfish; and you know, there would be a marlin in there, too. But then if we would go offshore to fish for tunas, we’d catch a few out there, but they were usually big, humongous marlin.

FS: What happened to the marlin?

LONGLINER: Well, once we got it up close to the boat and we could see what it was, if we knew it was a marlin, we could cut it off and let it swim away. You know, they put up a pretty good fight. But most of the time they would come up dead. That was one of the things that really got to me-all the dead fish that we would pull up.

FS: You would be out for a whole week?

LONGLINER: Yeah, sometimes longer.

FS: What time of day did you set your lines?

LONGLINER: You start right before dark.

FS: Why that time? Is that when swordfish bite better?

LONGLINER: Yeah, that’s just when they bite, that and it had to do with sharks—you didn’t want your line to be in the water early, because sharks can see it.

FS: What time of day would you pull in your lines?

LONGLINER: We start at six thirty or seven; try to get done around one in the afternoon.

FS: What kind of rigging?

LONGLINER: Mono. The main line was anywhere from 700- to 900-pound test, and our leaders were 400-pound test. And then the buoy drops, they would be like 200-pound test. And then see would have snaps; our snaps, we would have them at the end of the leader, and snap them on the main line. We were using like 9/0 hooks.

FS: Circle hooks or J hooks?

LONGLINER: J hooks, no circle hooks,

FS: How many hooks would be ore a line?

LONGLINER: Four to five hundred.

FS: How long did the line stretch?

LONGLINER: The 60-foot boat I worked on-I worked on that for like three years-we were fishing forty miles. But then the smaller boats I worked on, thee were 20 miles, 25 miles.

FS: What would be a good week’s catch?

LONGLINER: We mostly go by pounds. If we caught 3,000 pounds of swordfish, that was a pretty good catch. That’s pretty much paycheck. Price of fish had a lot to do with it. But there was a lot of by catch-a lot of undersize swordfish that we would catch. And it would really get to you some days. You would look behind the boat and there would be just a trail of dead fish floating. And there was nothing you could do with them because you can’t bring ‘em in legally, 33 pounds or under. And thee were just all dead; over 90 percent are dead when they come up. If they area live, you know, you cut the leader. If they were alive, we sure tried to make sure they swam away. You didn’t want to kill them. It just, it really, I mean it got so a lot of us... I wasn’t the only one. A lot of guys felt the same way.