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"Here are the still pictures that we have of the 600 pound Black Marlin that Stephen caught on Thursday, July 7th. What you don't see is what happened during the fight, which we have on video tape of this Marlin attacking the boat and striking Stephen in the head causing four fractures to his left cheek and the force split the back of his throat open. We were 30 miles offshore when this happened and it took over 2 hours to get back in and Tropic Star had a plane standing by to take us to Panama City to the Hospital. He was in a lot of pain and bleeding quite a bit but we got him there as fast as we could and into x-rays.

They kept him overnight and we left for home Friday morning and took him directly to our hospital where they checked him out and send us over to Atlanta Plastic Surgery. The surgeon examined Stephen and felt that right now we should wait for a week and bring him back after the swelling goes down but feels that him may not require any surgery on this injury. If you check picture 481, this jump was probably 30-40 yards away from the boat and the fish turned to the left during the jump. The next 1 to 1 1/2 seconds it launched itself directly at me sitting on the starboard edge of the boat and then turned slightly to port, hitting its' chest (if it had one) directly in the middle of the back edge, bounced up and moved it's head left to right and struck Stephen on his face with its' bill, knocking him out of the chair.

We have the entire thing on video tape which I plan on sending to everyone, at least the last several seconds so you can all see how much in control we were and how quickly that changed.

Bob

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Here are the pictures that I have taken off of the video footage. Look at them in ascending order, number 18, 23, 24 etc., then 10-13. This represents only about 3 to 3 1/2 seconds based on the video time stamp in total and some of you will be traveling to fish again with me at Tropic Star Lodge or elsewhere for Marlin and I want to make sure that you know how quickly it can change.

Bob