What began as a suspected shark encounter for two veteran Massachusetts fishermen turned into a record-worthy catch: a 1,200-plus-pound Atlantic blue marlin that may be the largest of its kind ever landed on the East Coast.
Damon Sacco, an experienced charter boat captain from Massachusetts, had been fishing for hours Wednesday with his client when he spotted an enormous fin slicing through the surface roughly 100 miles off Cape Cod.
Sacco initially believed the fish was a huge shark. But after getting a clearer look, he noticed the distinctive shape. “Dang, that thing’s pointed,” he recalled thinking, though the fish seemed almost “too big for a marlin.”
The surprise proved unforgettable: Sacco and his client, retired fisherman Walter Chapman, had hooked a 1,260-pound Atlantic blue marlin measuring more than 11 feet long.
Chapman, a lifelong angler from Plymouth, Massachusetts, battled the marlin on rod and reel for about three hours. He said it was, without question, the biggest fish he had ever fought on a line.
Sacco joked that his job during most of the remarkable fight was to “drive the bus around and yell at people” as the massive billfish tested the crew’s patience and skill.
The marlin’s bill punched a couple of holes in the charter boat’s transom, damage Sacco now proudly describes as “war marks.”
When the crew finally brought the enormous fish back to Falmouth, Massachusetts, an excited crowd was waiting. The fishermen now believe their catch could be 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
