James Roberts

Captain James Roberts is one of the most respected heavy tackle big game captains in the sport. He dominated the tournament circuit aboard the Renegade in the 1980s, then ran Jean Paul Richard's French Look mothership across the world's great marlin grounds. In Madeira he caught five grander blue marlin in just 43 days, a feat never repeated. A two-time IGFA honoree, awarded the Gil Keech and Tommy Gifford Awards, Roberts shares a lifetime of heavy tackle knowledge in his In The Spread Big Game Legends interview.

• Big Game Legends
• Saltwater

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James Roberts has spent his life chasing the biggest fish in the ocean, and he has caught them at a level almost no one can match. He is one of the most respected heavy tackle captains in the history of the sport, and his story is exactly the kind In The Spread built the Big Game Legends series to preserve.

It started young and a little wild. As a teenager, Roberts would hitchhike from Corpus Christi to Port Aransas with a surfboard, a heavy rod, and a suitcase holding a 12/0 Penn Senator, surfing by day and shark fishing the Gulf piers at night. He slept on picnic tables and talked his way onto charter boats, and more than once he had a boat drop him on an unmanned oil platform where he would camp and fish for days until someone came by to pick him up. That hunger never left him. He worked his way up through dive boats, offshore supply vessels, and sportfishing decks, steadily upgrading his licenses and moving to bigger boats and bigger fish.

His break came when IGFA Hall of Fame captain Skip Smith brought him on to help deliver Tom O'Connell's Renegade to Florida. Asked if he could run the boat for a tournament, Roberts said he thought he could, and that was the start of a legendary run. Aboard the Renegade, he dominated the East Coast and Gulf tournament circuit through the 1980s, fishing at the highest level from Texas to the Bahamas to South Florida.

Then he went global. In 1990, Roberts helped oversee the build of Jean Paul Richard's French Look, a 165-foot mothership operation, and spent years running it across the Mediterranean, the South Pacific, and beyond, fishing well over 200 days a year in the best marlin waters on earth: Madeira, the Great Barrier Reef, the Canary Islands, the Ivory Coast, Brazil, Panama, and Costa Rica. It was in Madeira that he did something no one has repeated, catching five grander blue marlin and releasing six more in a single 43-day stretch.

Roberts is also a conservationist. He was central to reestablishing the catch and release giant bluefin tuna fishery in Nova Scotia, working for years with Canadian fishermen and their government to bring that heavy tackle fishery back. The IGFA has recognized his lifetime of achievement with two of its highest honors, the Gil Keech Heavy Tackle Award and the Tommy Gifford Award.

In his In The Spread Big Game Legends interview, Roberts shares the hard-earned knowledge of a career spent at the top of heavy tackle marlin and tuna fishing. When one of the greatest big game captains alive talks, serious anglers listen.