Capturing Chaos
In May the Stuart Sailfish Club hosts a KDW tournament. King mackerel, dolphin and wahoo. There’s no placement for a sailfish. That’s a different tournament. We fished it in 2025 on the DayMaker with Capt. Nick Cremasco. Jason and Barbra and I had the rods while Nick ran the boat, which is the harder job. Nick put us on the kings early. He rigged and found the fish, and the rest of us reeled. Almost as fast as we could bait hooks, we had three large kings in the boat. Barbra caught a mahi that wasn’t big enough to place, but certainly big enough to eat. The biggest king was Jason’s at just under 27 pounds, and it would turn out to be the heaviest fish anybody weighed that day.
Then the morning went quiet, the way it does. It was a beautiful day to be out there. Just east of Stuart, flat calm, and better light than I had any right to expect. Quiet is not what you want in a tournament. Eventually I got a bite on a flatline with a live bait. Our one and only sail of the day. Nobody out there was fishing for sailfish. This one failed to read the rules. I fought it a couple of minutes and it jumped twice while I had the rod, and I thought well of myself for both. Then Nick said somebody needed pictures to record the release. I handed the rod to Jason, who was on my left, knowing Barbra didn’t want to catch a sailfish on a spinning reel. Then I went the long way around the captain’s seat to get to the camera, which sits on top of the console where it stays dry. Nick wasn’t at the wheel, so nothing was in my way. I came back up the starboard side and stood next to Jason. It was less than a minute since I’d let go of the rod, and I was hoping the show wasn’t over.
The fish was still on. That was all anybody knew. It could have thrown the hook, or gone down and stayed down, and a sailfish that has already jumped twice owes you nothing. It came up one more time. Pure adrenaline. The sail all the way open and the whole fish lit up by its own energy, blue and green down the flank. Twelve exposures. The first at 9:59:21.100, the last at 9:59:21.880. Seven hundred and eighty milliseconds. Barely three quarters of a second. We were out there all day and that’s how long the camera was of any use.
Some of the pictures below I would not normally show you. The fish is half out of the frame in one. In two of them it is gone and there is water and spray and nothing else. Sometimes this is all I am given to work with. Sometimes not even that. The fifth frame, a little over a quarter of a second in, has the whole fish in the air with the sail open. One frame freezes the fish. But in sequence it moves.
Jason had it to the boat a few minutes later, and Nick took the leader and let it go. We came in that afternoon and the club wrote the day on a whiteboard. Top mahi. Top king. Wahoo, which nobody caught. Aggregate, which was ours. And a line in the middle that read, “Sailfish: Scratch,” with a four in parentheses. Four sailfish came up across the whole fleet that day and were released. Not one of them scored, and none of them was ever going to.
DayMaker took the first and second heaviest kingfish and the aggregate, and two checks came with it. The club counted what it said it would count. The board is an accurate record of that day. The only mark that sailfish left on it is the difference between a three and a four. The prize money is spent and the tournament is a memory. What’s left is a day on the water with Jason and Barbra and Nick, a handful of pictures—and one spectacular shot.
By Robert Webb
Robert Webb specializes in offshore sportfishing action photography, shot from moving boats. Local to Stuart. See more of his work at robertwebbphotos.com.
