Stephen Sloan, who died Thursday at age 72, was a record-setting fisherman who wrote books about fishing and international fishery conservation.

Drawing on his vast aquatic expertise, as well as his experience as a real estate developer, Sloan in 1987 founded the Pan Am Water Shuttle, said to be the first commercial venture in New York maritime transit since the days of Commodore Vanderbilt.

Sloan at one time held 44 fishing records, as certified by the International Game Fishing Association. He caught the largest black marlin, weighing in at 862 pounds, on a 32-pound test line. However, Sloan was a devotee of the most punctilious dictates of sport fishing, insisting on the lightest-possible tackle. He once lost 22 straight blue marlins while attempting to become the first to land one using a 6-pound test line.

Fishing all over the world – but most often off Montauk – Sloan witnessed with dismay the decline of fisheries. “You used to be able to go off Montauk for a day and catch three or four brown sharks,” he said during a presentation at the Explorer’s Club, The New York Sun reported in 2003. “Now, you can’t catch one if you put your bleeding toe in the water.”

Sloan addressed such concerns on his radio show, “The Fishing Zone,” a syndicated weekly hour of fishing talk. In his 2003 book “Ocean Bankruptcy,” Sloan warned that the depletion of migratory fish species was occurring at up to three times conventionally accepted rates. The book laid out in depressing detail a plague of destructive fishing technologies, overfishing, and other factors leading to the collapse of fisheries. The book claimed that problems were exacerbated by governments in Asia, Europe, and South America that wink at violations of fishing treaties, if not refusing to sign them altogether.

The learning on display in “Ocean Bankruptcy” garnered for Sloan one of his proudest achievements, an appointment as an adjunct at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. It was an unusual achievement for a big-time New York real estate man.

Sloan was born in New York and had his first fishing expedition in Central Park, where an uncle helped him catch a minnow on a bent pin, his wife, Nanette, said. At Horace Mann, he played on several varsity teams and after college at Washington and Lee University, Sloan was recruited to pitch in the minor leagues, but chose not to. He went into real estate development with relatives and eventually became president of Lehman Brothers Realty Corporation. In the mid-1970s he started his own firm.

Fishing was an important part of Sloan’s marriage from the beginning, his wife recalled. “He asked me, ‘How’d you like to go to Bellefonte?’ I thought it was Harry Belafonte.” Actually, it was a Pennsylvania town renowned for its excellent trout stream, where the fish – and fishermen – started running at 4 a.m.

Sloan began setting records in the late 1970s, and piled them up in the 1980s in diverse locations, frequently crossing the Atlantic in his 42-foot Rybovich sportfishing boat. He caught a record-setting weakfish at Jones Beach, a blackfin tuna in Cozumel, Mexico, and a 25-pound jack crevalle in Senegal. During the Reagan administration, Sloan was named chairman of the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee, which worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

In partnership with Pan Am, Sloan founded the Water Shuttle in 1987, ferrying passengers between Pier 11 at the foot of Wall Street and the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia. With a half-hour ride to the airport and a price competitive with taxis, the ferry seemed a sure thing, and it prospered. Pan Am’s demise brought the ferry to an end, but Sloan should be credited with at least a small amount of inspiration for the rejuvenation of water transit in city waters.

“There’s a pantheism involved,” Sloan told Fortune magazine in a 1986 article headlined “Hunting Big Game at Sea.” “To see one of these animals come out of the sea and try to shake the hook is fabulous. … Unlike a big game hunter, you don’t have to kill. You can let the fish go and let it live.”

Sloan published two other books about fishing, “Fly Fishing Spoken Here,” a collection of his radio interviews, with illustrations by James Prosek, and “Thanatopfish,” a fictional memoir of his afterlife, inspired by a lifetime of fishing at remarkable locations around the world. The title was a play on “Thanatopsis,” meaning the contemplation of death, and title of an epochal poem by William Cullen Bryant. Sloan wrote it after learning he was stricken with terminal cancer.

Stephen Sloan

Born June 21, 1932, in New York City; died April 28 of cancer at his Manhattan apartment; survived by his wife, Nanette; children Suzanne Sloan Doyle and Robert Sloan, and two grandsons.