Billy Harrison

Billy Harrison is far more than a sport fishing captain. He is one of the most traveled big game fishermen alive, a pioneer of marlin tagging, and a professional sport fishing photographer. He learned the trade on Miami's famous Pier 5 docks, then fished the world, from St. Thomas' North Drop and Australia's Great Barrier Reef to twelve trips across Africa. In 1986, NOAA honored him for tagging more blue marlin than any captain that year. His In The Spread Big Game Legends interview preserves his stories.

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Call Billy Harrison a sport fishing captain and you have described maybe a third of the man. He is also one of the most traveled big game fishermen alive, a marlin tagging pioneer who put conservation first decades before it was fashionable, and a professional photographer whose images have run in nearly every major magazine in the sport. His life reads like a history of big game fishing itself, and In The Spread is proud to preserve it as part of the Big Game Legends series.

It started on the water in Miami. As a kid in Coconut Grove, Harrison worked after school on the commercial fishing docks, took a job at the Miami Seaquarium at thirteen, and found his calling at the famous Pier 5 charter docks, where he learned the trade from mentors like legendary Captain Buddy Carey and the Greeks, Bill and George Staros. That foundation launched a career that would carry him across the globe.

And travel he did, as few ever have. Harrison chased marlin in the Bahamas, fished Puerto Rico's San Juan International Billfish Tournament alongside Roy Camero and Ralph Christiansen Jr., and in 1969 found the blue marlin of St. Thomas' North Drop. He fished four seasons on Australia's Great Barrier Reef with legendary captains Peter Wright and Peter Bristow, made twelve trips across the continent of Africa, and ran to Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Cabo San Lucas, El Salvador, Ecuador, the Galapagos, Colombia, Venezuela, Hawaii, Bermuda, Cape Cod, and Prince Edward Island. He also became one of the biggest competitors in the storied years of the Cat Cay Bluefin Tuna Tournament.

Somewhere in all of it, Harrison became a conservationist ahead of his time. The North Drop is where he grew his passion for tagging and releasing marlin and giant bluefin tuna, and he pursued it with such dedication that in 1986, NOAA and the National Coalition for Marine Conservation gave him their highest honor for tagging more blue marlin than any captain that year.

Through every mile of it, he carried a camera. Harrison turned the extraordinary places he fished into a second career as a professional photographer, and his work has run in nearly all of the most important magazines in the sport.

In his In The Spread Big Game Legends interview, Harrison shares the stories and hard-won knowledge of a lifetime spent chasing billfish and giant tuna across the world's greatest fishing grounds. Few people have seen more of this sport, or shaped it more quietly, than Billy Harrison.