Birth of The Sportfish
In the 1930s and the 1940s, blue marlin and bluefin tuna were abundant in the waters of Cuba, Bimini and Cat Cay just a few miles off the Florida coast, targeted by fishermen such as Ernest Hemingway, and Habana Joe aboard his 1938 40-foot Wheeler named Pilar. Word spread quickly among fishermen around the world about the exciting new sport of big game fishing. Despite the growing popularity of the sport, however, the boats of the day were hardly ideal for the challenges of fighting the prized fish. Most boats utilized in those days were converted cabin cruisers and all were relatively slow and hard to maneuver.
Merritt gained particular notoriety during the 1950s through the 1970s with its 37- and 43-foot (13 m) custom sport fishing boats, which, together with boats like those being built at the same time by Rybovich, gave birth to a new category of fishing yachts and helped fuel the growth of big game sportfishing in the United States and around the world.
Today there is an active community of classic sport fishing boat enthusiasts who continue to restore, maintain and fish these boats around the globe.
Read more about this topic: Merritt Boat & Engine Works
Famous quotes containing the words birth of and/or birth:
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“I am fifty-two years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible. In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute—a white skin.”
—Desmond Tutu (b. 1931)