Page 18 - 52nd Annual White Marlin Open

2024 REVIEW

pulled it out of the boat with the winch,the
fish kept coming and coming”, said Blake-
more. “It made it look even bigger. The
crowd was going nuts. I thought,‘I can’t be-
lieve I just did that. How did that just hap-
pen?’ It was a once in a lifetime moment.”

Seems like the 2024 WMO brought a few
“once in a lifetime moments”, even in the
case of a fish that didn’t win. So it was for
Phil Key aboard the long time WMO boat,
Moore Bills owned by Shane Moore.

The moment almost didn’t happen, said
Moore. “We had rented a property and
were ready to go for the tournament but
our captain, Butch Davis, fell ill and ended
up in the hospital. We scrapped plans to
fish in the tournament and decided just to
hang out for the week”.

Moore continues. “At the last minute, Phil
said he thought he could find somebody.
He called some of his Charleston connec-
tions and found out Capt. Kip Edwards was
available. Kip had spent a good bit of time
up here and he knew the waters. He flew
in on Sunday and we were fishing on Monday.”

Key picks up the story from there. “We
were out on Thursday. The Stone Cut-
ter already had a 897 lb. blue on the board
so there was some thought to just go af-
ter the white marlin, but we said what the
heck, let’s at least have some bigger tackle
out. You never know.”

Sure enough at about 10:30 a.m, fishing in
the Poor Man’s, a blue came up on the left
side then switched to the right, hit the bait
and took off. The crew knew it was a good
size fish but it was not until it jumped the
first time that they knew just how big it
was. The fight was on.

One hour passed, then two, then four. Phil
Key was still battling the fish, fueled by wa-
ter and gatorade. 17 times they got the
fish to the boat and 17 times the fish de-
clared it wasn’t done and took off. Each

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WMO 52 Magazine.indd 18 7/15/25 8:02AM