Matt O. said:
Its ok that Brennan ruined my story and possibly the evening.
spit pop. love that flick.
buddy that owns bar in town just got back, caught a florida state record warsaw grouper, first measurement over 500 lbs, second (by length and girth state formula) 446 lbs. pretty cool. it was in a couple papers and I have it on my email, not going to take time to save and repost pics
here's his email
http://www.newsherald.com/sports/daniels-75666-bay-city.html
http://www.apalachtimes.com/articles/daniels-7208-bay-fishing.html
Many people have asked about the fish wanting to see more photo’s and details and some of you still don’t believe me, stating my Photoshop skills were at work. I put this email together to hopefully answer some questions and prove it is true. I was hoping to get some video of it put together and on YouTube, but that has failed. Like all fish they flap their tail so when this fish decided to do make a move it would drench everything in a 10 foot area. This occurred multiple times and fried my camcorder (water and electronics don’t mix well).
The long day starts off on our 6th day in Apalachicola, Florida. We got our bait fish and make it out to a reef 20 miles from shore. Within 20 minutes of arriving at the reef and getting everything ready we had our poles in the water and the fish start to bite. We pulled up a nice Cobia measuring 44 inches long and started to get the black snapper schooling behind our boat during the next 20 minutes. As I started to pull in a black snapper I saw my bottom rigged pole bob a little. I didn’t want the black snapper to get away so I kept my eye on the bottom rigged pole as I pulled the snapper in further. About 15 seconds later the pole bend down, at first I thought I hooked the reef, but then the pole bent up a little. When I saw the pool snap some I put the snapper pole in a rod holder and grabbed the pole. Once I removed the pole from the holder the fish knew something was up and the fight was on. All I could do at this point was hold the pole. My dad came back to help. He proceeded to put a waist support belt on me that contained a place to put the pole. The fish was pulling so hard that I could not physically put the butt of the pole in the holder that was now attached to my waist. Dad again helped maneuver the pole; all I could do was hold the pole. What you may not realize is that this pole is the biggest one my dad had. Each year we go fishing my dad gets bigger gear, because the fish just keep breaking the line. The reel is a 2 speed reel that never came out of the low gear ratio. The line is 200lb strength with a 400lb steel cable as the leader, followed by a 16/0 circle hook, which is a very big hook. I had the fish hooked and all I could do was to try and keep me and the pole in the boat, so my dad started pumping on the end of the pole and we started making progress on the fish. Grouper’s are not known as a fish that fights a lot, but since this fish had 446lbs of weight it provided a constant fight for 20 minutes. I would reel up some line only to see the line go back into the water for about 20 minutes before we got the fish off the bottom. After this happened, the Grouper almost gave up, but we still had the problem of 446lbs of weight on the end of the line.
Now what do we do? We identified the fish as a Warsaw Grouper, a grouper that we can keep (1 per vessel). We never expected to catch a fish this size and most definitely never thought that we would be able to keep the fish! We see what looks like a spear in the fish. One side of the fish has a bulge coming out about 2 inches and the other side has a pointed stainless rob protruding 3 inches out of its side. We attached a rope to the fish’s mouth to assist us in getting the fish in the boat, but the first couple attempts failed the fish was much bigger then we realized. We moved the very back corner of the boat and all 4 guys lifted on the head of the fish. Once we got the head cresting on the side of the boat the fish slim acted as oil and it slid to the bottom of the boat.
After 40 minutes of fishing and over an hour to get the fish in the boat our day of fishing was over. Back at the fishing lodge my dad went in and asked what could be done with this fish we caught, we can’t get it out of the boat. The manager on duty came out to see what these “non-Florida†guys were up too. The man was amazed, after seeing the fish he called the grounds keeper for the backhoe. Everyone standing around had to get a photo beside this fish. With the tail on the ground I could not reach the upper lip of the fish.
Another hour passed and we made the decision not go through the unknown effort to get it officially weighted and certified. The fish had already been out of the water for 2 hours in 100 degree heat and it needed to be cut up and cooled. No one knew what exactly needed to be done to get it weighed and into the record books. The current Warsaw Grouper record is 436lbs. Some suggested to start at the post office as they may have had a scale big enough. The estimated weight used the standard formula girth squared times length then divided by 800. The fish was 82†long and had a girth of 66 inches. Our thoughts were that this fish can’t be transported easily and if we attempted the unknown effort the meat would have been lost, which was not our goal. The filleting of the fish was started by Clint and Ken as I tried to revive the camcorder, which unfortunately which failed. Clint and Ken found that what we thought was a spear was actually a scuba divers fishing string. It was a curved stainless rod that scuba divers put their fish on. One of two events must have occurred, either this fish stole it from a scuba diver or the scuba diver got scared and let go. This big Warsaw grouper eats other fish that are of good size, but it swallowed more than it wanted too. After he swallowed the rod, it poked a hole in the fish and that is what we thought was the spear.
The city were we caught the fish ran an article that appeared on the front page of the newspaper. The Panama City newspaper, which is about an 1 hour west of where we fished, posted an article in their newspaper. You can view both of these online. On Saturday, the USA Today paper had a sentence about the fish.
Panama City Herald.
http://www.newsherald.com/sports/daniels-75666-bay-city.html
Apalachicola Times
http://www.apalachtimes.com/articles/daniels-7208-bay-fishing.html
Enjoy!
uke: ! Great trip anyways. :****:
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