Onshore at The Lodge
In the 1950s Cabo Blanco ran on a heady mix of big fish, celebrities and high times. Big-time names like Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Glassell, Ted Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Enrique Pardo Heeren stayed at the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club and fished along the westernmost edge of South America in search of huge black marlin in Peru's famed "Marlin Alley."

World records hit the beach and world-class parties filled the halls of the Club.  Today, Cabo Blanco is no more than a small, desolate spot on a beautiful coastline, but this past April, three legends from the glory days made their way down to the Restaurante Cabo Blanco to share a fine grouper ceviche and some memories of the past.

Captains Maximo Jacinto and Rufino Tume, along with club bartender Pablo Cordoba, all well into their 80s, were fixtures in the local fishing scene when Texan Alfred Glassell first showed up with Miss Texas in search of grander black marlin.  "The U.S. captain and his crew knew how to catch marlin," recalls Jacinto, "but they didn't know where to fish for them. We showed them where to go and how to prepare dead baits to act as live."

Cordoba, acknowledged by Hemingway to have made the best bloody mary in the world, remembers: "The crowds that came with Hemingway, sometimes as many as 20, drank a lot. One time I dove beneath his boat to liberate the prop from some clear rope, and when I climbed back aboard, he gave me a whole glass of whisky… a whole big glass."

The biggest change since the days of the 1950s? "No people come to fish," says Tume.

"The big fish are still here," says Jacinto. "Some of these young men try to harpoon the big blacks and they break the lines. There are very big fish here."

All three easily agreed on the seasons: "If you want to catch striped marlin, come between January and March; for the big blacks come in May to September when we have wind," says Jacinto.