Two longtime Massachusetts fishermen initially thought they were reeling in a shark, but instead they caught a 1,200-pound marlin, believed to be the biggest of its kind ever hauled in on the East Coast.
Damon Sacco, a seasoned charter fishing boat captain from the Bay State had been fishing for hours with his client on Wednesday when he caught a glimpse of a giant fin breaking the water’s surface about 100 miles off Cape Cod, MA.
At first, Sacco thought it was a massive shark but then he “got a better look at it and thought, dang, that thing’s pointed” and assumed it was “too big for a marlin,” he recalled.
To his surprise, the fisherman had caught a 1,260-pound Atlantic blue marlin that measured in at over 11 feet in length alongside his client, retiree Water Chapman.
Chapman, a lifelong fisherman from Plymouth, Mass., fought on rod and reel with the marlin for about three hours and said it was unquestionably the biggest fish he’s ever fought on a line before.
Meanwhile, Sacco said his role for most of the stunning adventure was to “drive the bus around and yell at people.”
The marlin’s bill left a couple of holes in the charter boat’s transform which Sacco considers “war marks.”
After hauling the mammoth billfish back to shore in Falmouth, Mass., where an excited crowd was waiting, the fishermen believe it is the largest Atlantic blue marlin ever caught off the East Coast.
“People fish their entire lives and never come close to a catch like this,” Falmouth local Katie Curran said.
“Hats off to Captain Damon Sacco and the crew on the catch of a lifetime,” Curran quipped.
The Massachusetts marlin weighed just 142 pounds shy of the world record for an Atlantic blue marlin caught in 1992 off the coast of Brazil, according to the International Game Fish Association records.
More remarkable, however, is reeling in such an enormous catch off New England, according to Walt Golet, director of the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab.
“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,” Golet said.
For most of the year, the water in the Northeast is too cold for marlin fish, making the window to catch such a large one extremely narrow, said Golet, who also works as an associate professor at the university’s marine sciences school.
The 1,260-pound fish was caught in Atlantis Canyon, an underwater canyon on the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles off Cape Cod.
Golet said the blue marlin, which are highly migratory fish, are seasonal visitors to the area.
The fish’s head was transported to the UMaine lab to determine its age but Golet speculated it could be in the range of 25 to 30 years old.
The meat of the over one-thousand-pound fish was divided among about a dozen people, according to Chapman, who is currently looking up recipes to put the meat to good use.
“I wasn’t going to eat a 1,200-pound fish all by myself,” Chapman joked and said some of the meat is probably destined for clam chowder.
With Post wires
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