Two Massachusetts fishermen spent three hours fighting to reel in what they at first thought was a shark, but turned out to be likely the largest Atlantic blue marlins ever caught off the East Coast.
Damon Stacco said the day started off with no luck, then after he and client Walter Chapman loaded up the boat with yellowfin tuna, he saw a fin while fishing roughly 100 miles off Cape Cod.
A "huge dorsal," he wrote on his Instagram page. "Am I really seeing this? Four feet high but pointed. A blue hue flashed beneath it. Pecs? Holy s--- it's a marlin! The fin dissappeared [sic] when I screamed. I dropped back the rod beside me and the tip bounced. Line ripped from beneath my fingers."
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He told reporters he at first thought the fish was "too big" to be a marlin.
"Well, it’s official," he wrote on Instagram on the Wednesday catch, explaining that the fish weighed in at 1,260 pounds on an IGFA certified scale in Falmouth.
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He called it a "gift from the Gods and new blue marlin Mass. state record and possibly for the Western Atlantic."
It was also just 142 pounds short of the world record, which was a 1,402 Atlantic blue marlin caught off Brazil 34 years ago.
Stacco said Chapman did most of the work on his charter boat, Castafari, joking that his job was to "drive the bus around and yell at people."
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Walt Golet, director of the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab, said the catch in waters off Massachusetts is even more remarkable because the water is too cold most of the year.
Golet estimated the fish might be 25 to 30 years old as its head was taken to his lab for confirmation.
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"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.
Stacco said the fish also left some holes in the boat’s transom, which he called "war marks."
Chapman, who is also a lifelong fisherman, said the meat would be divided among about a dozen people.
"I wasn't going to eat a 1,200-pound fish all by myself," he said.
