Stephan Kreupl

My father took me trout fishing when I was six years old. This was the beginning of my great passion for angling. Towards the end of the seventies we visited Florida and finished up in Key West where all those beautiful white yachts and charter boats docked in the marina having caught fish with long bills and big sails. The moment I saw them I knew at once: I want to catch fish like those myself.

By the time I got home I was completely obsessed with the thought of catching a sailfish once in my life. In the early eighties we spent our vacation in Hawaii – the ultimate big game fishing center. During trip number 61, and probably at a time when my spirits couldn’t have been any lower or my angling frustration any higher, I had that liberating marlin strike and a hook-up. It was a small striped marlin of about 120 lbs. – my first marlin after all those years, but man was I happy…

New destinations had to be found. I was so passionate that I bought my first set of big game tackle, spent days tying knots and double leaders, performed load tests and did plenty of dry runs. I wanted to do more and more on my own and tried to perfect everything. In theory things went a lot better than they did later on in reality.

The absolute culmination of my angling career came on 30^th January, 2007 off Rodrigues with a Pacific Blue Marlin weighed in at 1,238 lbs. and was later confirmed as the IGFA world record in the 80 lb. class. It had taken one of my unnamed lures that I had been taking along in my tackle box for years. Afterwards I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging this lure through the high seas again and possibly losing it.

This was the time to build my own marlin lures. I wanted to make replicas of this particular lure and this is how our BluewaterFishing lures came into being, one of which I used to catch my second weighed marlin grander, an Atlantic Blue of 1,150 lbs., in May 2011 in the Cape Verde Islands. In the meantime, BluewaterFishing lures are used all over the world.

Apart from hunting big game, over recent years I have developed a taste for jigging, popper and fly fishing. This interest remains at the top of my fishing list to this very day. It is no longer a question of the ultimate size or the ultimate weight but has more to do with the atmosphere that surrounds you – with one single exception. Since until now no fisherman in the world has been able to catch a weighed grander slam, I set myself this target and pushed my angling luck by traveling to the Great Barrier Reef in search of a black marlin grander.

26th of October 2019. After 8 years and a total of 96 days’ fishing the Great Barrier Reef I finally succeeded in officially catching and weighing a grander Black Marlin of 1,032 lbs. and thus become the world’s first angler to achieve a Marlin Grander Slam. It was a tough time but the hunt for this ultimate record is now over. You can’t imagine how huge the burden was that fell off my shoulders. From now on marlin fishing will take on an entirely new dimension; no more stress, no more record hunting, just pure fishing for fun.

Language skills: Deutsch, Englisch

Website: www.bluewaterfishing.eu

E-Mail: s.kreupl@bluewaterfishing.eu

Phone: +49 (0) 1716903145