A Galapagos Islands vacation offers some of the best marlin fishing in the world, but the waters off the archipelago are not the only place where marlin can be found.
You may have gone fishing for blue marlin in the waters off Florida or maybe you went fishing for striped marlin off the coast of California. Marlin can be found from Australia and Hawaii to Bermuda and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Marlin can also be found on the shelves of your local library, swimming through the pages of books new and old.
The Marlin that Is a Literary Legend
When it comes to authors who have managed to catch a marlin in the pages of their books, the first name that comes to mind has to be Ernest Hemingway, whose classic The Old Man and the Sea won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
According to the publisher, it is Hemingway’s most beloved and popular novel and has sold millions of copies over the years. The novel is also the last book Hemingway ever published. In the story, an old Cuban fisherman, who is down on his luck, endures a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
This is from the publisher: “Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic.”
Here’s just a tiny taste of why the book has remained so popular over the years:
“The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out.”
Fishing for a massive marlin in the pages of an Ernest Hemingway novel is one type of adventure – and it’s one that you can savor again and again.
