The 13th Annual Huk Big Fish Classic wrapped up in Ocean City this past weekend, closing out a tournament that introduced the sport’s first dedicated women’s marlin release division alongside its usual hunt for the Atlantic’s biggest game fish.
The tournament ran July 24-26 out of Talbot Street Pier, with teams fishing in one of two 32-hour windows — Friday into Saturday or Saturday into Sunday — before returning to public weigh-ins hosted at MR Ducks each evening. Boats left the dock no earlier than 2 a.m. with lines in the water by 7 a.m. on their first fishing day, competing across categories that included blue and white marlin, tuna, swordfish, mahi and wahoo. The event followed a record-setting 2025 tournament that paid out a $1.256 million purse, with the top boat, Honor, alone taking home more than $458,000.
This year’s headline addition was the Ladies Marlin Release Division, billed by organizers as the world’s first 32-hour women-only marlin release competition. Tournament Director and co-founder Brian Roberts said the new division was meant to build directly on the tournament’s founding mission of honoring Ocean City’s sportfishing history. “Women have played an important role in this fishery for generations, and we’re excited to provide a dedicated stage for today’s female anglers to compete, inspire others, and make history of their own,” Roberts said. Huk CEO Bryan Johnston, whose company has presented the tournament since it launched in 2014, said the division was designed to celebrate “the female athletes who play an imperative role in the sport of offshore fishing.”
All images courtesy of HUK
Organizers tied the new division to the history of Talbot Street Pier itself, where women helped shape the area’s competitive billfishing culture beginning in the late 1930s. Ocean City has branded itself the “White Marlin Capital of the World” for decades, a reputation that traces back to a celebrated white marlin fishing trip President Franklin D. Roosevelt took aboard the presidential yacht.
Beyond the competition, the tournament has built a reputation for its community ties. Fish brought to the scales are professionally filleted and donated to Diakonia, a Worcester County nonprofit serving people experiencing homelessness; last year’s donations totaled thousands of pounds of fish, helping provide an estimated 5,000 meals over the following year. The tournament also raises money for the Ocean City Volunteer Fire Department and other local charitable groups, and its nightly weigh-ins have become a signature summer waterfront draw for spectators along Talbot Street.
The tournament’s prize structure has grown substantially since its 2014 launch, built around a fully guaranteed top prize in its Division A category for the single heaviest qualifying fish, supplemented by a range of optional entry levels that boost payouts across multiple species categories. Past tournaments have seen a single winning boat collect six figures from a lone record catch — the 2025 champion, Honor, took home more than $458,000 on its own — underscoring why offshore teams from up and down the East Coast continue to travel to Ocean City each summer to compete.
Complete results from this year’s tournament, including the winners of the new Ladies Marlin Release Division and the season’s top qualifying catches across all categories, are posted on the tournament’s official leaderboard at bigfishclassic.com. Registration and schedule information for next year’s event are expected to be released on the same site later this year.
The Big Fish Classic is one of several major offshore tournaments that draw large fields to Ocean City’s marinas each summer, part of a broader sportfishing calendar that has helped cement the town’s identity as a East Coast hub for big-game angling. Organizers have said they expect the tournament’s footprint, and its total purse, to keep growing in future years as more teams and sponsors take notice of the event’s expanding format.
