Big-game sport fishing as the world knows it started in a small bay on Santa Catalina Island. Before Avalon, a fish the size of a marlin was something you took with a harpoon or a handline. After Avalon, it was something you were expected to fight on a rod and reel, on tackle light enough to give the fish a real contest.
The state of California put it plainly when it made the Tuna Club of Avalon Historical Landmark No. 997: the club is "the birthplace of modern big game sportfishing" (California Office of Historic Preservation). Marlin are a big part of that story. For the fish itself, see our marlin guide.
A club built on a rule
The Tuna Club was founded in Avalon in 1898 by the naturalist and writer Charles Frederick Holder, after he took a bluefin of 183 pounds on rod and reel around that time. Accounts disagree on whether the catch came in 1897 or 1898. What the club stood for is not in dispute.
Holder described it himself in a 1908 paper for the federal Bureau of Fisheries: the club "introduced light-tackle fishing as a sportsmanlike movement, also to prevent the undue slaughter of fish" (Holder, 1908). The landmark citation says the founders adopted rules of conduct stressing conservation.
That was a radical idea for its time. The point was not how many fish came home but how they were caught. Line strength was limited, tackle was regulated, and a fish taken on heavy gear did not count.
The first marlin on rod and reel
Marlin entered the story in 1903, when the first one was taken on rod and reel off Catalina. The accounts agree on the year but not the angler. One widely told version credits Captain Harry Willey, and says the Tuna Club declined to record his fish because he was a professional boatman rather than a member (InTheBite). Other accounts name a club member. Either way, the era of marlin sport fishing in Southern California dates to about 1903.
The fish were bigger then. Marlin landed at Catalina between 1910 and 1916 averaged about 182 pounds. By 1960 to 1975 the long-term average across Southern California clubs was 142 pounds, and the NOAA scientist who compiled the figures noted the drop "may be the result of fishing" (Squire, 1983).
Even after that decline, the fish that reach this coast stand out. The same NOAA work found marlin weighed in Southern California averaged about 37 pounds heavier than fish landed near Cabo San Lucas. The Bight sits at the northern edge of the marlin's range, and the fish that make the trip this far north tend to be big ones.
From market fish to sport fish
For its first decades, marlin was both a sport fish and a market fish in California. That changed in stages. The state's regulation history lists game-fish status in 1931, a ban on harpooning, a ban on selling marlin, and a one-fish daily limit, and since 1937 California has reserved marlin for recreational anglers alone (Bedford and Hagerman, 1983).
The clubs kept the record. From 1941 on, roughly nine in ten marlin landed in Southern California were weighed at one of three clubs: the Tuna Club at Avalon, the Balboa Angling Club in Newport Harbor, and the San Diego Marlin Club. Those weigh slips are a large part of why scientists today can say anything about how the fishery behaved in the last century.
Flags in the harbor
Avalon also gave the sport one of its most visible traditions. The Tuna Club is credited with the first oversized, colored capture flags flown from a boat coming home, and a swordfish flag existed by 1915 (InTheBite). The red release pennant came later and from elsewhere, from the West Palm Beach Fishing Club in Florida in 1938. Today a marlin flag flown upside down traditionally means a fish released.
From weigh-ins to releases
The weigh scale has given way to the release. Most Southern California marlin go back today, and crews have spent decades tagging them for science. NOAA's cooperative billfish tagging program distributed more than 80,000 tags between 1963 and 2021 and logged over 600 recoveries. Two fish tagged off California turned up 1,500 miles to the west and 2,400 miles to the south, early proof of how far these fish range. Our post on how SoCal crews catch marlin covers how a release is done today.
The ethic Holder wrote down in 1908, fish on fair tackle and do not take more than the sport needs, is the one most marlin crews still fish by.
Visiting the history
The Tuna Club is still on Avalon Bay, and the banks the early anglers fished, Avalon Bank, the 14 Mile Bank and the water east of the island, still hold marlin in a warm year. Catalina is a short run from San Pedro and Long Beach. If you go, read up on the marlin season first, check the CDFW ocean sport fishing regulations, and keep the NOAA marine forecast close for the crossing.
