The 2025 Cairns black marlin season closed with a fish that even an 18-season veteran skipper had spent his whole career hunting. Captain Daniel Klein, running the Shore Thing 58 alongside its mothership the Shore Thing 115, weighed a 1,223-pound black marlin off the Great Barrier Reef on the final day of a 7-day charter — his first ever grander as a captain.
Klein's reflections on the catch, captured in the short film GRANDER by Nick Jones, frame the fish as the payoff for a 100-day slog rather than a single lucky bite. "The word grander to me is the pinnacle of game fishing," Klein said. "These don't come along every day. I wish they would, but they certainly don't. And the hours, the sacrifices that myself and the crew have made for this moment to happen is what it's all about."
The trip itself was built around Luke "LG" Gerathy's 50th birthday celebration with a group of mates. Before the headline fish, day one of the charter had already delivered an 810-pound marlin to Simon Johnson — taken right on top of the ridge in only 45 metres of water. "It was quite an incredible fight. It never took me out to the deep," Klein recalled. "The shallows we got was right up on top of the ridge in 45 m of water, which for a fish in that 900-pound class range is pretty incredible. It's very shallow."
The bite on the eventual 1,223-pounder came at 2 pm off the centre rigger, on a tuna. "I didn't see the bite — the boys saw it. They said it was pretty spectacular," Klein said. "Still remember, for such a quiet, quiet person Smithers is, when he sees a big fish and he's yelling, you know it's a big fish on the bite. And just look back and just see this giant hole on the stinger. We knew then that it was a special fish."
Reef fishery encounter rate, Klein argued in the film, sits well above anywhere else in the world this time of year. "It was actually quite incredible how many giant marlin were there up on the reef spawning, feeding," he said. "Every day you're seeing someone catch a big giant marlin. You look around when bite time's on, there'd be three or four boats chasing giant fish around. It's quite incredible."
Boat-side, Klein had to make the call most reef skippers spend a decade avoiding: weigh or release. The crew had pre-agreed before the charter that a thousand-plus fish would go on the scales, but Klein still walked the deck twice to be sure. "The hard thing is that two inches is a couple of 100 pounds," he said. "So it's very hard to get a grasp of how big a fish is, and I wanted to make sure that we were sure. It needed to be a definite 100 percent — which is what it was."
He framed the actual weigh as more than a personal milestone. "I've been working, driving boats down for 9 years and this is the first one that I've weighed," Klein said. "It's truly, truly special fish for me and for my crew. Both their first granders weighed."
For an Australian sport-fishing audience watching reef encounter rates and seasonal weather patterns shift year to year, Klein's pitch on Cairns is also a tourism case. "The beauty of the Cairns fishery is if you were to do a 7-day charter, you, it's a very, very high chance you're going to see something cool," he said. "You're going to see a giant marlin. You're going to have an interaction which you cannot do anywhere else in the world."
Asked what carries crews through the back-end of a 100-day reef stint, Klein landed on the same answer that has kept his team turning up at 5 am for nearly two decades. "What gets me out of bed on day 80 of a 100-day season when you're cooked and you're super tired," he said, "is that we're all here to catch a big fish. And this is the best place in the world to do it."