After battling a tournament clinching Blue Marlin for over four hours, keeping a watchful eye out for hungry tiger sharks and enduring more than his share of muscle spasms, Peter Bromby might have wished he had just gone sailing instead.

The local Olympic Star skipper, competing with a crew of six onboard Peter Rans? 40-foot Custom Carolina bettered a 569-lb specimen landed onboard to walk away with top honours on the final day of the fifth annual Bermuda Big Game Classic fishing tournament over the weekend.

Speaking by phone to , a recovering Bromby conceded: ?I definitely have some muscles hurting on me today that I never knew I had before. There?s definitely no doubt about that.?

Bromby, who competed at last summer?s Olympic Games in Athens, hooked into the 850-lb fish on 130-lb test line on the southern edge of the Island early on Saturday afternoon.

His troubles had only begun.

Nearly two hours into the battle the large fish expired at a considerable depth, leaving Bromby and his team-mates no option but to plane the marlin to the surface, applying minimum drag on the reel while pulling against the water current.

?When we hooked the fish it then went down and died. So we had to get a dead fish up,? explained Bromby. ?And that?s hard to do. We had to pull up 850 pounds of fish on 130-lb line.?

The fact that the boat did not have a transom door, adequate block and tackle onboard and the threat of sharks taking a bite out of the prized catch in tow only heightened the crew?s anxieties, added Bromby.