Two experienced Massachusetts fishermen caught a whopper of a fish on Wednesday that left them in disbelief.
Charter fishing boat captain Damon Sacco and his client Walter Chapman caught the massive creature approximately 100 miles off Cape Cod and could not believe their eyes when they realized just how big it was, the New York Post reported Saturday.
The men initially thought it was a shark but the fish turned out to be a 1,260-pound Atlantic blue marlin that is believed to be the largest ever caught on the East Coast.
The marlin put up a three-hour fight with Chapman on the other end of the line. It also poked holes in the boat’s transom before it was eventually hauled to shore in Falmouth.
“I’ve caught a ton of marlin, but I’ve never seen a dorsal this big. It was four feet off the water. She leapt like ten feet in the air and this was like, what I thought was a 900-pound fish, ended up being 1,260 pounds,” Sacco recalled:
He added:
But all of that fish came blasting out of the ocean. I remember thinking to myself, “Good God, this thing is like a monster.” And I got my angler on the reel and a lot of yelling and screaming and it was a long, arduous battle. I think he was on that fish for almost three hours. I mean it was a game of inches, little closer, and then finally we saw the color which was just the sheer, you know, the body of the fish, the glow. Looks like… looked like a spaceship.
Atlantic blue marlins can grow quite large and weigh up to 2,000 pounds, with females outgrowing males, according to Mass.gov.
The recent catch was just over 140 pounds shy of the world record for an Atlantic blue marlin, which was caught in Brazil, the Associated Press (AP) reported:
To catch such a huge fish off New England might be even more remarkable, said Walt Golet, director of the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab and an associate professor at the university’s marine sciences school. The water is too cold for them in the Northeast most of the year, making the window to catch a big one very narrow.
The fish’s head was on its way to the UMaine lab to determine its age, said Golet, who speculated that it could be in the range of 25 to 30 years.
Falmouth neighbor Katie Curran said, “People fish their entire lives and never come close to a catch like this. Hats off to Captain Damon Sacco and the crew on the catch of a lifetime.”