Phil glad a blue water hunter of your experience chimed in... why would it have been lost? Not enough buoyancy(what bouncy do you think is needed) or crush depth? Each one of those bullets floats is 11lb of buoyancy and the middle one would be about 7-8lb I would think, for a total of about 29 lb of lift at the surface. The yellow floats have a working depth of over 500ft for the commercial applications they are used for, but the orange lobster floats wont have much lift beyond 200 ft based on my tests. Every fish behaves differently I know, but Marco in Venezuela says they use just one of those floats for big wahoo up to 80lb. I shoot 20-30 lb wahoo in Antigua which is wayyyy different than an 80lb monster so interested as to the physics or reasons in your experience this set up would fail.
just the way i saw the the fish take the 2 lobster floats down , if you let go of the float line for any reason , the fish would be down and gone , if the boat could see and chase down the floats if and when they come up you could still land the fish . im just saying you set up isnt a sure thing , as your marlin is a good example of it got away from the fisherman that hooked it .
i prefer to err on the safe side , on tuna /wahoo/billfish trips i use a 30# flotation hard float , and a riffe 2 atm float on the end of the line ,and sometimes if im really expecting big fish i will have another float behind that . to me it is not acceptable to loose fish , its one thing to use light gear flyfishing ,but for spearfishing if you shoot it it is dead , you need to have the gear to land it 100% of the time