Other G&S Boats The HookerPerhaps the most famous of all the G&S boats, The Hooker set world records all over the Atlantic and the Pacific. Her owners, Jerry and Debra Dunaway, ordered T-shirts and stickers with a logo of a topless girl sitting in the bend of a fishhook sipping champagne. The stickers ultimately showed up on pilings, windshields, cocktail lounge bars and ski-lift towers across several continents.
The 48-foot Hooker first hit the water in 1985. She was what G&S called a "yacht finish" — a level of finish work higher than that of the numerous G&S charter boats that made up the cream of the Destin, Florida, fleet. The Hooker would eventually fish from Africa to Australia, first traveling the Caribbean and the western Pacific on her own bottom, then crossing oceans in the company of her mothership, The Madam.
Many of the Dunaways' decades-old billfish captures are still world records, and at one time, Deborah Dunaway held an existing world record for every species of billfish found in the world's oceans.
Legendary Capt. Skip Smith of The Hooker says, "From a relatively small number of boats, Buddy Gentry and Steve Sauer came up with a number of good innovations that other well-known builders have since copied."
Today, Capt. Trevor Cockle pilots the original Hooker in Central America, chasing marlin on light tackle from Costa Rica to Panama.
Raptor
This 1983 40-foot G&S is one I've spent a lot of time on. For several years, I fished aboard her in the Bahamas during the spring run of giant bluefin tuna. We sight-fished for cobia for several days in Destin as a sea trial before leaving the Florida Panhandle for the run to Bimini. With Raptor's exceptionally agile 40-foot hull, Charles Perry, Gary Stuve, Charley "Split Tail" Hayden, John Rafter and myself helped angler Stewart Campbell catch and release 73 giant bluefin tuna in one day off Cape Hatteras. I had perhaps the best crew ever assembled helping out that day. The picture of the team is in a kiosk in the IGFA Hall of Fame Museum.
Spirit of Pilar II
Enrico Capozzi and Stacey Parkerson have also been making waves in the world-record game, and Capozzi raves about Spirit of Pilar's ability to back up and spin around quickly when chasing down a wildly leaping marlin. Their most recent captures have been on fly tackle where there is no long leader for a mate to grab. The angler must fight the fish all the way to the boat on the rod until the mate can reach the fish with a stick gaff — there are no flying gaffs allowed.
Buddy Gentry told me that this 41 G&S spins 360 degrees in a mere 19 seconds. This boat was built during a period when G&S built what Gentry categorized as "charter boats." When the Gentry and Sauer crew started emphasizing their ability to create what Gentry now calls "game boats," they modified the shape of both the bottom of the boat and the transom to attempt to increase the agility of what were already the world's most agile fish chasers.
Silver-Rod-O
Former Atlantan Gary Carter now spends much of his time in Carrillo on the Guanacaste Peninsula of Costa Rica. When he is not fishing in his home waters, you may find him in other parts of Costa Rica, farther south in Panama or up in Guatemala. His vessel of choice is the most agile G&S built to this day, a 45-footer custom built for Carter called Silver-Rod-O.
Silver-Rod-O sports a pronounced radius in the transom and in the corners where the hull sides meet the stern. These rounded corners help enormously when fishing heavy tackle from a fighting chair, making it easier for the rod tip to clear the corners on a pin-wheeling fish.
Gentry and Carter also feel that the rounded stern aids in backing up by decreasing the size of the stern wave. The rounded shape allows water to flow around and away from the transom. With an amazingly quick, under 15-seconds time to complete a 360-degree turn, this may well be the most agile G&S ever built, possibly the most nimble fish-chasing vessel of all time.
In 2007, Carter won The Billfish Foundation award for releasing the most blue marlin in the Pacific Ocean. He also caught the first grand slam on 8-pound or less, catching a sail and striped marlin on 8-pound and a blue on 6-pound, all in one wild day of fishing
