Global Courant 2023-05-23 04:22:48
After a four-and-a-half hour battle with a deep-sea behemoth, a fisherman reeled in one of the largest marlin ever caught off the Alabama coast – and a new tournament record.
During the Orange Beach Billfish Classic fishing tournament on May 19, a Georgia district commissioner, Brian Stover and the fishing team of the “Mollie”, led by Captain Jeff Shoults, hooked something big.
Shoults told the Orange Beach News that his team used blackfin tuna as bait to try to catch marlin, one of the specialties of the deep-sea fishermen.
About 250 miles off the coastthe rod and reel were handed to Brian Stover — and the line started running, AL.com reported.
“At that point everyone saw what I was feeling,” Stover told AL.com. “That thing was like a dinosaur coming out of the water. The head was huge.”
The fish was weighed by tournament officials and hit a a whopping 776.4 pounds. It wasn’t just the biggest fish of the weekend; it was the largest fish ever caught in the tournament. It was more than 3 meters long, the tournament reported.
“We didn’t spend much time fishing after that,” Shoults told the Orange Beach News. “When you catch the biggest you’ve ever caught, you think about it and you think, ‘Well, am I really going to catch a bigger one or should we just go home?’ We just left home.”
Stover told AL.com that he had previously fished for marlin in Costa Rica, bringing home a fish weighing about 350 pounds, only half the size of the new record.
The fish was a record breaker in the tournament, but did not break the state record. The state records is held by Ginger Meyers of Sunset, Louisiana, who landed an 851.9-pound marlin in 2020, according to OutdoorAlabama.com.
Stover’s 776-pound winning fish also came with a big prize — $183,000, AL.com reported.
Shoults told Orange Beach News that the fish will be donated to area food banks and other organizations.
Orange Beach is located on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, about 50 miles southeast of Mobile.
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