876-pound tuna takes 9 hours to land
It took nine hours, but Troy Lancaster got his state record.
The 50-year-old angler from Port Aransas outlasted an 876pound, 121-inch bluefin tuna with a day-long fight on April 13. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has confirmed the fish as the state’s record.
“When the fish got on the deck of the boat, it was like killing a big trophy deer,” Lancaster said.
“There was absolutely no ground shrinkage.”
Lancaster had been waiting several weeks for the weather to cooperate before he set out the evening of April 12 with Captain Justin Drummond and the crew of Quantified (of Venatura Excursions) to pursue blue marlin near an oil rig 155 miles offshore.
A couple of big bites hit to no avail before Drummond steered his vessel to a mark on his sonar. Around 9:20 a.m., the beastly bluefin was hooked and the fight was on. The fish ate two live baits, skipjack tuna, and a line was cut to make it a one-reel job. Lancaster was using 80-pound tackle with a 19/0 hook as big as one’s hand.
Speculation on board as to what this monster fish could be leaned toward bluefin tuna once the fish stayed below for a while. A marlin would’ve likely broken the surface during the struggle.
“The way that it responded we knew, we knew. We know the time of season… This is that time of year that we can encounter these things in the Gulf,” said Drummond, who added that his crew had caught two bluefins last year but released them because the season was closed.
“We had a pretty good idea of what it was.”
The fish made Lancaster earn the record. A battle that started mid-morning would last until about 6:20 in the evening.
“It was just back and forth for about 7 or 8 of those hours. Then we didn’t feel anymore movement on the line, no more head shakes or tail shakes or anything. So from that point on, about the last hour and a half, we were fighting just dead weight on the fish,” Lancaster said.
“Every single crank I was palming the spool just to keep the line from creeping out,” he added.
“I’m sure that we had well over 50 pounds of drag on 80-pound tackle, which is sketchy. Very, very sketchy.”
When the fish finally did get to the boat, the crew struggled for an hour to squeeze the bulky bluefin through the door.
“The head on the thing, it’s as big as the hood of your car,” Lancaster said.
Once the fish was landed, the decision was promptly made to cut the trip short, make haste to port and weigh the fish to claim the state record.
“We knew what the record was, and we knew it was going to be close,” Drummond said.
Quantified, with Captain Drummond and mates Cameron Plaag and Leif Woolverton among those on board, arrived at the docks well past midnight. A crowd of around 50 people had gathered to witness a fish become legend.
“It was just a big celebration. A lot of happy people, happy crew, ” Lancaster said. “A lot of stuff has to happen for you for a fish like that to get to the boat, much less it being the right fish. There’s a whole lot of stuff that can go wrong when you have that much pressure on a fish for that long.”.
Among the crowd at Fisherman’s Wharf was Kesley Banks, a postdoctoral research associate with the Harte Research Institute.
She took samples for a necropsy to learn more about a fish her and other researchers don’t often get a chance to put hands on.
“You can land, on average, five a year in the Gulf of Mexico. So, being able to get our hands on any one that’s landed is a pretty rare opportunity,” Banks said.
So few are landed each year because of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration regulations intended to protect the species. Anglers are not allowed to target bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico, but those with the proper permits can keep one trophy-class fish, at least 73 inches, per boat per year if caught incidentally while fishing for other species. The harvest must be reported within 24 hours.
The fishery is also subject to quotas. The season effectively closes when the quotas are met, which is why only a handful of bluefin are harvested each year. The Gulf of Mexico is subject to a subquota of 1.8 metric tons. A NOAA spokesperson said that Lancaster’s state record singlehandedly accounts for 22 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s bluefin quota.
Bluefin tuna migrate to the Gulf of Mexico for one reason: to spawn millions of eggs from midApril to June. The Gulf is one of two known spawning grounds for the species in the world. The other is in the Mediterranean.
“The sole purpose those fish are in the Gulf of Mexico is to spawn,” Banks said.
The bluefins Banks has worked on previously have been in the 1724 age range. Lancaster’s catch was a fast grower at 19 years old. A bluefin caught a little more than a week later was 23 years old, but 706 pounds.
These fish stop getting longer at a certain point in their growth and just add girth.
“It was definitely one of the plumpest bluefin I’ve worked on, that’s for sure,” Banks said.
And now it’s officially the plumpest bluefin to ever be caught off Texas. The previous record was an 808-pounder in 1985.
And, still, they get plumper. NOAA acknowledges that these fish can reach 2,000 pounds. The world-record bluefin is a whopping 1,496 pounds and was caught by Ken Fraser off Nova Scotia in 1979.
Fraser got off easy compared to Lancaster, though.
That harvest took 45 minutes.