When Captain Daniel Klein watched the 1,223-pound digit settle on the scales at the Cairns Marlin Marina last October, it ended a 100-day chase that the Shore Thing skipper would describe in only one word.
"The word grander to me is the pinnacle of game fishing," Klein said in GRANDER, a short film by Nick Jones documenting Shore Thing's 2025 Great Barrier Reef season. "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."
Klein, a veteran of 18 reef seasons, was running the Shore Thing 58 alongside the mothership Shore Thing 115 for a 7-day charter built around Luke "LG" Gerathy's 50th birthday party. The boats had spent days peppering bait balls between Cairns and Cooktown when, on the final session, a tuna on the centre rigger disappeared in the kind of bite Klein has been chasing his whole career.
"I didn't see the bite — the boys saw it. They said it was pretty spectacular," Klein recalled. "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."
The angler in the chair was tied on to what the crew already suspected was a 1,200-pound class fish. Boat-side, the calls only got harder. "The hard thing is that two inches is a couple of 100 pounds," Klein 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."
The crew had made a quiet pact before LG's group came aboard: if a thousand-plus pounder went down, they would take it. Both Klein and the boat owner pulled the trigger when the leader came in.
Earlier in the same week, the same group had already had a window into reef life. On day one, an 810-pound marlin fell to Simon Johnson on top of the ridge in just 45 metres of water. "It was quite an incredible fight. It never took me out to the deep," Klein said. "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."
What sets Cairns apart, Klein argued, is sheer encounter rate. "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."
The 1,223-pound fish was a personal first for both Klein and the rest of the deck. "1,223 pound is my first big grander as a captain," he said. "I've been working, driving boats down for 9 years and this is the first one that I've weighed. It's truly, truly special fish for me and for my crew. Both their first granders weighed."
The film closes with the captain reflecting on the trade-off behind a 100-day season — sore fingers, missed birthdays, mothership routine — and what it takes to keep a deck pumped that long. "What gets me out of bed on day 80 of a 100-day season when you're cooked and you're super tired," Klein said, "is that we're all here to catch a big fish. And this is the best place in the world to do it."
