The Only Captain to Release Two Grander Atlantic Blue Marlin in a Single Day
Sunday, September 25, 1994, started like many other days for Captain James “Chuy” Roberts. He sat at the helm of the 40-foot Gamefisherman, the French Look, and chugged out of Funchal harbor on the Portuguese island of Madeira en route to the East Atlantic Ridge. “What could possibly happen today?” Roberts thought. Most captains, crews, and anglers would have wished to catch a grander blue marlin. Roberts had already accomplished this feat with the French Look and its mothership’s owner, Jean Paul Richard, not once, but many times in their first season in Madeira in 1994. August 24th kicked off an incredible month-long run.
With Roberts at the helm and Richard in the fighting chair, the French Look team caught a 1,011-pounder on the 24th and released one on the 31st. During the first three weeks of September, they caught seven more granders, of which the largest weighed 1,157-pounds. Then, on the 25th, Roberts became the only captain to release two grander Atlantic blue marlin in a single day, a feat unmatched. “I think the more incredible story is 11 granders, we weighed in five and released six in a month, or even better, five from the 20th to 25th,” says Roberts. “With the average fish exceeding 700 pounds, we were weeding through the 7-, 8-, and 900-pounders to get those granders. What I think about now is all the big ones that got away when we fished in Brazil, Cabo Verde, the Canaries, and the Azores.”
Seatrout, Sheepshead and Sharks to Start
Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, Roberts’ first fishing experiences were angling from the banks of Corpus Christi Bay. His maternal grandfather worked as a shrimper, which may have sparked his interest in the sport. “I’d fish for anything that would bite, redfish, trout, sheepshead, it didn’t matter,” Roberts said. “As I got older, probably around 12, my interest turned to shark fishing. I did this with friends. We would fish off the beach, piers, jetties, and small gas wells close to the beach in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Roberts landed his first summer job deck-handing on charter boats in Port Aransas at age 14. First was Cloud Nine, a 31-foot Chris Craft Commander, with Captain Leon Brown. Next, he worked for Captain Rick Corn on the Bertram 31, Hustler. A private job on a 37-foot Hatteras called Good Life followed. Roberts’ interest in water sports grew beyond fishing and into surfing, scuba diving, and sailing. He worked for a small dive operation out of Port Aransas the summer after graduating high school. When the season ended, he got a job on boats servicing offshore oil platforms.
“I got my first captain’s license working in the offshore oil industry, starting at 100 tons and ending with a 1,600-ton,” he said. “These boats were anywhere from 95- to 185-footers. I eventually operated out of every port from Venice, Louisiana, to Port Mansfield, Texas. Back then, it wasn’t forbidden to fish off the boats. We bottom fished mostly and did some popper casting, so I got a lot of time fishing in while I was at work. But by the early 1980s, I wanted to go sport fishing full-time.”
Running Renegade
An opportunity came up to do just that when a 54-foot Bertram called Renegade, owned by Tom O’Connell, came through Port Aransas. When Renegade left Texas, Roberts was on it, first as a mate and the following year as captain. Renegade engaged in an ambitious twenty-tournament program that saw the team travel the entire U.S. East Coast, from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Key West, Florida, the Bahamas, the Mexican Yucatan, and the Cayman Islands. This was the mid-80s, and they towed auxiliary boats starting with a 25-foot Boston Whaler and Mako and eventually moving up to a 32-foot Velocity.
Roberts had long been an aficionado of big-game fishing but began learning many more fishing techniques aboard Renegade. Tournament wins in 1985 included the International Billfish League’s (IBL) Key West Blue Marlin Tournament and ILB’s Palm Beach Tournament, with second at the Mid-Atlantic Tournament, thanks to catching a 738-pound blue marlin, and second overall in the Florida Keys Triple Crown.
“We won the Pompano Beach Rodeo in 1985 with a 305-pounder, which was protested,” Roberts said. “So, we took the winnings, bought a ship (a 150-foot Dutch Freighter), and sank it in the artificial reef program in front of Pompano. It’s named the Renegade Rodeo Reef.” Over the next four years, the Renegade team championed the Cozumel International Billfish Tournament three times, the only boat to do so, the Martha’s Vineyard White Marlin Tournament, the first-ever Oaks Bluff Monster Shark Tournament, and the Cape Cod Tuna Tournament. Several second-place finishes included the Nantucket Billfish Tournament and the North South Sailfish Tournament in Palm Beach.
Early in 1987, O’Connell began building an 80-foot Monterey. He completed it two years later. With 7,000 hp engines, it was the fastest sport fisherman built at the time. The trip northeast for the summer, from Fort Lauderdale to Atlantic City, took only 19 1/2 hours of running time. “Three times while I worked for Mr. O’Connell, he sent me and the crew to the Great Barrier Reef for two weeks fishing,” Roberts said. “On the third trip, we had a party on the mothership and invited the other boats around us. This is when I met Jean-Paul Richard.” This was his introduction to his future employer on the French Look.
In the meantime, the Renegade job ended in late 1989. The following year, Roberts ran a boat for MLB player Von Hayes. This job started in the fall and lasted until spring training. “We moved around Palm Beach and the Keys, met some of Von’s friends like Larry Christiansen and Tug McGraw, and went to Daryl Dalton’s bachelor party,” says Roberts.
Chasing Marlin Mother-Ship Style
In the early summer of 1990, Roberts found himself back in Texas. He was fishing with friends when he got a call from Scott Boyd, owner of Bill Boyd’s Tackle Shop in Fort Lauderdale. Boyd told him the French Look’s Richard wanted to hire a crew and create a mothership program. At first, Roberts turned the job down. “Then, after a little thought, I realized I wanted to do it,” he says.
The project entailed transforming a 165-foot offshore supply boat into a mothership. Roberts was familiar with Deborah and Jerry Dunaway’s Madam & Hooker operation, although the deployment and retrieval system were different, and the French Look was much bigger and broader. The mothership’s transformation was partially underway when Roberts signed on, as it had already been shipped to the CMN Shipyard in Cherbourg, France. Meanwhile, Richard had a 40-foot Gamefisherman under construction in San Jose, Costa Rica, to serve as the program’s game boat. Setting up such a program wasn’t without a couple of hitches.
The game boat shipped from Costa Rica to Fort Lauderdale, where it was taken to the Rybovich yard in West Palm Beach and finished. Early the following year, it shipped to Europe. “The tower crashed during shipment, so we had to put a new one on it. We took the tower off at the shipyard in Cherbourg, and without a tower, we shipped the boat overland down to a small port called Saint Mandrier-sur-Mer near Toulon,” Roberts said. “We had a tower constructed in Fort Lauderdale, airfreighted it to France, and erected it at a shipyard called Pin Roland.”
During the tower’s construction and the game boat’s overland travel prep, Roberts and the crew, Doug Haigh and Scott Lewis, traveled to Costa Rica. They fished for two weeks on the Tijereta, a 40-foot Gamefisherman run by Captain Bubba Carter, and two weeks on the Dunaway’s Madam & Hooker, with Captain Trevor Cockle at the helm of the Hooker.
“Two of us flew from Costa Rica to Marseille to meet the game boat when it arrived, and the other crew went to Cherbourg to get the tackle and bring it down,” says Roberts. “As we watched the boat pull into the yard, there was an elevation difference between the road and the yard’s entrance, and the rudder got stuck in the bottom of the boat. All the service companies – tower, engine controls, and electronics – came from the U.S. The job finished in three weeks.”
The fast repair kept the French Look team on its planned schedule to fish giant bluefin tuna tournaments. They won the Saint Cyprian bluefin tournament, then Roberts took the boat around the Iberian Peninsula back up to the English Channel to Cherbourg. It proved a feat in a 40-footer with a 200-mile range. The crew settled into a house in Cherbourg, and the focus moved to the mothership.
The mothership’s four-year completion, from 1990 to 1994, meant trips to the Mediterranean and Canary Islands on the game boat’s bottom. Each of these years, the French Look team left France every three months and traveled to Tahiti, Costa Rica, Australia, and elsewhere to keep the crew fishing. In February 1992, they flew to Tahiti for a month, leased a boat, and won the Papeete Tahiti Billfish Tournament. The following summer, they made a quick trip back to the Mediterranean to fish in the tuna tournaments again.
They successfully defended their champion title in the Saint Cyprian and added first place in the Canet Plage Tournament. A 21-day fishing trip to the Great Barrier Reef, back to Tahiti to win a tournament in Bora Bora, and one last long journey on the game boat to Lanzarote, Canary Islands, followed. The fishing was great, especially east of Alegranza Island, but the weather was rough. The plan was to return the following season with the new mothership.
“The fishing was awful that next season with the mothership in the Canaries,” said Roberts, “so we moved west to La Gomera and found great fishing targeting blue marlin for three weeks, until it slowed. That’s when we decided to go to Madeira. In the years following that incredible 1994 season, plenty more granders were caught, just not as frequently. In the 1995 season, only three were caught by us, the largest at 1,204 pounds.”
Nova Scotia’s Giant Bluefin Tuna
The IGFA awarded Roberts the Gil Keech Heavy-Tackle Award in 2022. In his bio for this accolade, Roberts is credited with helping to put the catch-and-release fishery for giant bluefin tuna back on the map in Nova Scotia and re-establishing it as a premier heavy-tackle fishery. “I feel confident saying the Canadian Maritimes is the undisputed capital of giant bluefin tuna fishing,” says Roberts. “Look at the IGFA Record Book; all the big ones come from there. But due most likely to overfishing and possibly some other factors, from 1987 to 1995 it was very lean in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.”
During this time, the Canadian giant tuna quota was reduced and redistributed to other ICCAT member countries because the Canadians couldn’t catch their allocation. This caused licenses to become inactive. Once the fish returned and licenses became active again, the quota reduction meant the distribution became one giant tuna per season for the average license, with the possibility of a second every other season. To add value to the license, Nova Scotia started its Hook and Release Pilot Program for giant tuna in 2010 with Captain Roberts fishing with Captain Darrell “Heyman” Neary on Neary’s 45-foot Downeast. This new era of Canadian giant tuna fishing off Nova Scotia had 27 boats in recreational hook-and-release charters at its peak.
Fishing Today and Tomorrow
The people Roberts met on global travels as part of the Renegade and French Look programs enabled him to start an independent phase of freelancing and deliveries. From 1999, and over the next decade-plus, tournament wins included the Bertram Hatteras Shoot Out, the Poco Bueno, the Tred Barta Kids Tournament in the Dominican Republic, the ESPN Billfish Extreme in Antigua, and first place in release divisions in the Los Cabos Billfish Tournament and Bisbee’s alum tournaments like the Black & Blue. During this time, as well as currently, Roberts continues to fish in Canada, the U.S. East Coast, the Bahamas, the Azores, Madeira, Cabo Verde, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Gulf of Guinea. His bucket list is simply to continue fishing.
“In today’s world, there is more infrastructure to support sportfishing boats in what once were remote places,” he said. “Also, boats are bigger and able to extend their time at sea, but nothing offers the independence of a support vessel. There are currently several mothership projects in the works and some in the field today. It’s an old concept that’s happening more often.”
Originally featured in InTheBite Magazine July/August 2025 Issue.
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