They Will Fish the Best Waters in All the World : A Man With a $2-Million Dream Sets Sail on the Adventure of a Lifetime

The voyage of El Zorro.

If that sounds like a book, it probably will be. A movie, too. It has long been a dream for fisherman Jim Edmiston. A dream to go fishing around the world, to ply waters never before fished by sport fishermen.

Edmiston and a crew of six left San Diego last Sunday on what may be the ultimate fishing trip. El Zorro--it translates to The Fox--is scheduled to return to San Diego Bay Aug. 15, 1988.

In recent years, sport fishermen on long-range tuna trips out of San Diego have enjoyed calling themselves the long rangers, on their 17- to 23-day trips to the Revillagigedo Islands 300 miles south of Baja California, and Clipperton and the Cocos islands, off Costa Rica.

With one trip, Edmiston will turn them into short rangers.

Around the world in 24 months, with hook and line. Islands in the sun. Go ahead, dare to dream.

Want to go? It’s not too late. Although the vessel has left, the fishing will not start until after it reaches Hawaii, and Edmiston said that for $400,000, you can have a stateroom all to yourself for the long haul on his 95-foot El Zorro. Sound a little high? Hey, you get a free hat.

Edmiston, though, is selling segments, too, and if you want to go on only part of the trip--say, the seven days from Ponape to Kusaie Island in Micronesia--it’s about $600 a day, less if you don’t plan to do any big-game fishing.

If you’re a saltwater angler, maybe you want to troll the Indian Ocean waters around Mauritius. Or the Seychelles. Perhaps you would like to cast or troll for tuna and billfish near the multitudes of islands, reefs and atolls in the Pacific. How about fishing for bluefin tuna at the Azores and Canary Islands? What about those stories of giant yellowfin tuna and wahoo at Fanning Island, 1,300 miles south of Hawaii? How about dragging marlin lures past South Pacific atolls you never heard of?

It all sounds absolutely smashing to Edmiston.

“The trip has been in the making for about three years,” he said recently. “I’d reached the point in my life where I’d done as much marlin fishing at Cabo San Lucas as I cared to, and around early 1984 I started looking for a boat.

“At the time, I had in mind a trip around the coast of South America and the Caribbean. I learned that a San Diego long-range boat called The Executive had been taken over by a bank, so I checked it out. I bought it from the bank in January 1985 (and renamed it El Zorro).

“I studied the fuel capacity and everything, and it hit me out of the blue--that I could go around the world on this boat.”

Edmiston, his crew and passengers will actually fish their way around the world in four boats. Riding in a cradle above El Zorro’s stern will be a 34-foot custom twin-diesel inboard from which virtually all the big-game fishing will occur. A 5,000-pound crane is mounted on the stern to lift El Zorro Too on and off El Zorro. Up top, behind the wheelhouse, are two 15-foot, outboard-powered skiffs, for light-tackle reef fishing.

Edmiston doesn’t figure on getting rich on the trip. Far from it. The week El Zorro prepared to leave San Diego, only 176 room days, out of a total of about 1,000, had been booked. Edmiston had spent $2.2 million--including the cost of El Zorro--before the bon voyage party.

Said Bill Poole, a San Diego pioneer long-range skipper: “This is a case of a guy who wants very badly to fish his way around the world and is taking on paying fishermen so he can charge it off as a business loss.”

Edmiston, though, was hoping right up until he left to find a taker on the $400,000 all-the-way deal.

“If I’m crazy enough to spend $2.2 million on this project, surely there’s a fisherman out there somewhere crazy enough to spend $400,000 to go with me,” he said.

The plan is for El Zorro’s fishermen to fly to ports along the boat’s route, be picked up at airports by crew members wearing green El Zorro blazers, and join the expedition for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks. They will be dropped off at other ports, from which they will fly home.

El Zorro will carry no more than six fishermen at a time, since only four can fish from El Zorro Too. And you don’t have to be a big-game fisherman to come aboard. Light-tackle fishermen can travel on the boat and fish from the skiffs over reefs for $275 a day. Snorkelers and beachcombers can go for $100 a day.

But lest anyone forget who’s el jefe in this operation, read this line from a paragraph in El Zorro’s itinerary, about fishing on El Zorro Too: “ . . . of the spots available, one is always filled by Jim Edmiston, who will take his normal time or rod rotation sequence . . . “

Edmiston will be with El Zorro for most of the journey, but will return for quarterly board meetings of Alopex Industries, a San Marcos firm he describes as a mini-conglomerate owned entirely by him and his 72-year-old father, James Edmiston. The company owns a company that makes swimming pool vacuum cleaners, an advertising agency, and an electronics firm.

“Much of the preparation for this trip has been finding people competent to run our companies while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ve got a Telex machine in my stateroom and monthly sales reports will be sent to me.”

Edmiston said he settled on the concept of carrying a fast fishing boat aboard El Zorro after studying San Diego’s long-range commercial tuna boats.

“After I found The Executive, I took it off the market for 20 days and had engineers go on board and study, among other factors, the feasibility of mounting a fast, 32-foot inboard over the deck.

“I definitely wanted something small to fish from. I’ve fished for years on my 60-foot Hatteras at Cabo San Lucas, and it got to seem silly to me, chasing nine-foot fish with a 60-foot boat. The 34-footer has fighting chairs in the bow and stern, you can walk around the boat, and it has a tuna tower. We can travel a couple of hundred miles a day from the mother ship, if we have to.”

The voyage of El Zorro, which has a 4,000-mile range, will actually begin in Hawaii, after it has completed its 11-day run to Hilo. “Fuel is cheaper there than at Honolulu or Kona,” Edmiston said. The first passengers will go aboard at Kona, where the fishermen will stalk blue marlin for seven days.

El Zorro’s other destinations, in order: Christmas and Fanning islands; Ponape Island; Kusaie Island; Truk; Cairns, Australia; Ngatik Atoll; Perth, Australia; Mauritius; the Seychelles; Mombasa, Kenya; northern regions of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas; Gibraltar; the Azores; the Canary Islands; Cape Verde Island; the Ivory Coast; Rio de Janeiro and Recife, Brazil; French Guiana; Suriname; Georgetown, Guyana; Caracas, Venezuela, and numerous islands in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal to the Revillagigedo Islands and up to San Diego.

The voyage was scheduled around two important dates, Edmiston said.

“We wanted to be in Cairns, Australia, in November because that’s the prime black marlin season, and we wanted to be in Perth for a few days of the America’s Cup in early ’87.”

Edmiston said that about a dozen countries were contacted for permission to make fuel stops. Only one refused, Saudi Arabia.

Booking legs of the trip is a travel agent’s nightmare, right?

“It’s a real challenge,” agreed Deborah Ensley of Balboa Travel in San Diego, El Zorro’s booking agent.

“The hardest part is obtaining visas or visa information for some of the countries that aren’t on the normal tourist path, like the Ivory Coast and Senegal.”

Flight schedules are critical, Edmiston said. “When we get to someplace like, say, Ponape, where there are only two or three flights a week, we want to make only one trip to the airport to pick someone up. That’s another reason why we’ve got a Telex aboard, so we’ll know about things like flight delays or cancellations.”

Some leeway was written into the itinerary, however.

“There are ways we can spend an extra day or two in some hot fishing places and make up the time later,” Edmiston said.

There won’t be much time for sightseeing, though. “We’re going to have very little port time on this trip,” he said. “It’s not a cruise. We’ve turned down people who thought it was a cruise. It’s a dead-serious fishing trip.”

A two-man video crew will be on board for the entire two years, though. “We hope to wind up with the ultimate saltwater fishing film,” Edmiston said.

The multi-million dollar trip sort of grew out of an old, stubborn dream.

“Ever since I caught a sailfish at Acapulco, about 20 years ago, I’ve dreamed about catching the first 2,000-pound marlin,” Edmiston said.

“I’ve always had that goal in the back of my mind, and we’ll be fishing some areas that have never been sport-fished. More realistically, I’ve identified about 50 world records we’ll have decent chances of breaking on the trip.”

That may not be easy, cautions one veteran record-seeker.

“I’ve read about Edmiston’s plans, and I have to say that world fishing records aren’t that easy to come by,” said Ralph Mikkelsen of Northridge, who has broken a few. Mikkelsen, himself a long ranger, is constantly in quest of the first rod-and-reel 400-pound yellowfin tuna.

“Even if you’re good, you have to also be super lucky,” he said. “As for the 2,000-pound marlin, so many excellent fishermen have been after that fish . . . It’s awful tough.

“I considered his trip for purposes of possibly finding some big yellowfins somewhere, but I decided I like my chances better on the San Diego long-range boats. I’m always fishing in waters with skippers thoroughly familiar with the area, and that makes a lot of difference.”

There is more to the voyage than fishing, though. There is excitement, adventure, life. That’s why some of the crewmen are going.

Fred DeBardelaben, for instance, has gone from high-salaried sales director to deckhand. He has taken a 90% salary cut, and talks like the happiest man in the world.

“I had 17 years in with Firestone, then three with Amoco, in the South,” he said. I was traveling all the time, dealing with a lot of stress, making a lot of money. Then, when I was 37, I had a little heart attack.

“Believe me, that changes your priorities real fast. I felt like I was being squeezed to death by my career. So I backed off, and decided to sail around the world on a 40-foot boat I’d bought in Galveston.

“I bought the boat last October and was planning the trip when Jim--who’s married to my sister--called me. He talked me into it. It wasn’t hard. So I’m a deckhand, making about one-tenth what I made before. And I’ve never been happier.

“One of the really good feelings I have about this is that I know 10 years from now I won’t be having thoughts like: ‘Geez, why didn’t I go on that El Zorro trip . . .’ ”

Don Rampsch is another who gave up a career to sign on, as cook, medic and electrician.

“I’m an electrical engineer,” he said. “I’ve had a good career for about 20 years, designing and working with electronic medical equipment. People tell me I’ve given up a lot to become a cook on a fishing trip, but I don’t look at it at all like that.

“My attitude is, I only live once. Somewhere out there, there’s a monster tuna with my name on it. I’ve never cooked for a living, but I do love to cook and I was a health officer in the Navy, which meant checking all food that came aboard Navy ships.

“I was also a corpsman in the Navy, which means I can take care of some medical problems on the trip. And I can also repair electrical and electronic equipment.

“I was in my office one day, daydreaming about fishing and reading Western Outdoor News, when I saw Jim’s ad for crewmen. That’s how it started.”

Charles Perry had another reason. He’s a veteran, highly regarded big-game fishing guide. He was shivering, throwing logs in a wood-burning stove in his North Carolina home one day last winter when the phone rang.

“I’m trying to get warm in my drafty, 92-year-old house, and some guy on the line is asking me if I want to sail around the world through the tropics, fishing,” Perry recalled.

“I figure this is some friend, pulling my leg. I’m saying, ‘Sure, sure . . . ‘ and waiting for the punch line. There wasn’t a punch line. It was on the level. As soon as I realized it was no joke, I was ready to leave.

“Jim was interested in me because I’ve fished eight seasons on the Great Barrier Reef. In 1973, a fisherman on my boat caught a 1,417-pound black, the second-largest in the world that year. In ‘76, my boat had six granders (thousand-pound fish).

“So I know how to fish the reef. But one thing I never got to do in all the time I was over there was fish an area near Samurai, New Guinea. I think most of the bait--bonito and dorado--for black marlin migrate through that area. I’ve always felt it would be a productive place to fish, and we’re going to do it on this trip.”

The fishermen of El Zorro?

Dick Laub, 64, figured that the timing was just right. He’s semi-retired from his industrial real estate firm.

“I’m at the point in my life where I can afford to do some of the things I’ve always dreamed about,” he said. “I’ve been on the long-range trips to the Revillagigedos, two trips to Clipperton and another to Cocos. They were all great trips, but this is something special.

“I’ve waited long enough to fish in different places in the world. My wife, Dorothea, and I are going to join the El Zorro in Cairns, on Nov. 1. We’ll fish the reef four days for blacks in the inboard, then fish two days in the skiffs with light tackle.”

Dr. Glenn Sutton, a dentist from Providence, R.I., will join El Zorro at Ponape and fish from Sept. 18-26, from Ponape to Kusaie Island.

“My primary interest is black and blue marlin, scuba diving at some of the islands and atolls, and collecting some marine specimens,” he said. “I see the potential of some very big tuna on my part of the trip, too.

“It’s an opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve never heard of a trip like this and I was immediately interested when I learned about it. I’m so caught up in the adventure of the thing, that the more I think about it the more I feel like I could care less if I catch any fish or not.”

Back on El Zorro, Edmiston was showing a visitor a library area just off the wheelhouse. He picked up a 356-page notebook full of charts showing atolls, islands, reefs and anchorages. He pointed to a pinprick in the sea east of New Guinea.

“This place has always fascinated me,” he said. “It’s called Lyra Reef. Look at these fathom readings, all around it. Thousands of fathoms deep for 30 miles in every direction, and then this abrupt rise in the ocean floor. There has to be a good food chain there, and that could mean big marlin.

“This entire part of Micronesia, from Lyra Reef to the Great Barrier Reef, excites me more than any other part of the trip.”

Edmiston was asked what would happen when the trip was over.

“I don’t know,” he said, after a long pause.

“I’ve thought about that. Is this a one-shot deal? I really don’t know. I may come home, fuel it up, and take off again. Or maybe I won’t ever want to look at another fishing rod again.

“Whatever happens, I have a feeling this trip will change my life, that I’ll be a different person when I get back.”