Molly Palmer, 28, would have needed to reel in the fish by herself in order for it to qualify as a v

HONOLULU — A Hawaii tournament angler fought a 12-foot, half-ton marlin in the Pacific Ocean for more than four hours before she and her teammates got the monster fish out of the water — but she missed out on the glory and thousands of dollars in prize money.
Molly Palmer, 28, would have needed to reel in the fish by herself in order for it to qualify as a valid catch for the tournament, according to rules set by the International Game Fishing Association.
Cheating would have been easy and tempting. The Big Island Invitational Marlin Tournament runs in part on an honor system and Palmer, her captain and crewmates put up roughly $9,000 rhine river travel guides to enter last week.
"We don't have officials on the field like you do in baseball or football or anything rhine river travel guides like that," he said. "Everybody's playing on the open ocean playing field, and since there's nobody there checking to see if you stepped out of bounds or any of that sort of stuff, there's a whole lot of opportunity to do things nobody would know of."
Neal Isaacs, the boat's captain, said the team knew the fish was big — but not necessarily that big — when they saw it start jumping to free itself from the line nearly 40 minutes after it was hooked. The battle then became about whether the boat could position rhine river travel guides itself to give Palmer enough leverage to reel it in, he said.