A New Hampshire fisherman smashed a record that has stood for 13 years after he caught the state’s largest bluefin tuna weighing over 1,100 pounds.
Brandon McGirl was hoping to reel in anything when he boarded the Out of Line, a Savage Charters NH boat captained by Jamie Savage, on Saturday, October 3, for an overnight fishing trip out of Rye Harbor on the New Hampshire Seacoast, WMUR reported.
“It was very difficult conditions to try and fish. It was a little bit rougher than we were hoping for,” McGirl told the outlet.
After hours on the open water — with almost nothing to show for their effort — the crew was gearing up to call it a night when, out of nowhere, McGirl’s reel began clicking.
“They never come when you expect them to come,” McGirl said.
The crew chased the fish for about a mile before finally getting it alongside the boat during the grueling struggle.
With no way to get it on deck, they towed the fish back toward the harbor, where they lifted the beast from the water.
“We lifted it out of the water and immediately knew it was way bigger than what we thought and bigger than anything either of us had seen before,” Savage said.
The fish turned out to be a monster bluefin tuna that tipped the scales at 1,116 pounds — more than 150 pounds heavier than the previous New Hampshire record, set in 2013, the outlet reported.
McGirl could barely believe what they had reeled in.
“If you tuna fish for long time, to catch a 1,000-pound fish, is, I mean, it’s something that you dream of,” he told the outlet.
A photo of the catch shows the tuna nearly as long as both men’s height and so big that it barely fit in the boat.
The record-breaking catch even drew congratulations from Gov. Kelly Ayotte the next day.
“Now THAT is a catch,” Ayotte wrote on Facebook, sharing a link to WMUR’s report.
The catch also came close to a national mark. The largest bluefin tuna on record in US waters weighed 1,142 pounds, 12 ounces, and was caught off Block Island, Rhode Island, by J. Dempsey in September 1981 — about 27 pounds more than McGirl’s fish, according to On The Water.
The tuna will be sold and could be shipped as far as Japan, but its tail will stay behind at the harbor, a souvenir of the record-setting day, WMUR reported.
McGirl told Foster’s Daily Democrat that he’ll be paid by check later and doesn’t yet know what the fish will fetch.