PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Damon Sacco had never seen anything like the fish he and fellow anglers fought for hours in the waters off Massachusetts. As it rose from the depths, it looked like a glimmering blue spaceship.
Sacco, a longtime Massachusetts charter fishing boat captain, saw the giant fin break the surface, and at first he thought he was dealing with an enormous shark.
“Then I got a better look at it and thought, dang, that thing’s pointed,” he said. “But that’s too big for a marlin.”
He was wrong. Sacco and his client Walter Chapman landed what they and others believe is the largest Atlantic blue marlin ever caught off the U.S. East Coast on Wednesday. The massive billfish, more than 11 feet (335 cm) in length, weighed 1,260 pounds (571.5 kilograms) when they got it back to land in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
That was just 142 pounds (64.4 kilograms) shy of the world record for an Atlantic blue marlin, caught off Brazil in 1992, according to records kept by the International Game Fish Association.
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.
“I don’t suspect there will be a whole lot of blue marlin caught in the Atlantic in general that are going to top 1,200 pounds for the next several years,” he said.
On the day of the catch, Sacco’s charter boat, Castafari, was fishing Atlantis Canyon, an underwater canyon on the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off Cape Cod. The highly migratory blue marlin is a seasonal visitor to the area, Golet said.
The battle with the marlin took about three hours and was fought on rod and reel by Chapman. Sacco said his role for most of the adventure was to “drive the bus around and yell at people.” He added that the fish left a couple of holes in the boat’s transom with its bill that he considers “war marks.”
Chapman, a retiree and lifelong fisherman from Plymouth, said the meat of the fish was divided among about a dozen people, and he’s currently looking up recipes for what to do with it. He said the marlin is unquestionably the biggest fish he’s ever fought on a line, and some of it’s probably destined for fish chowder.
“I wasn’t going to eat a 1,200 pound fish all by myself,” Chapman said.
When the boat returned to the docks, a crowd was waiting, and weighing the fish became a brief spectacle. Onlooker Katie Curran of Falmouth said it was spectacular.
“People fish their entire lives and never come close to a catch like this,” Curran said. “Hats off to Captain Damon Sacco and the crew on the catch of a lifetime.”