Two Florida anglers have landed a Warsaw grouper so enormous that it required the strength of an entire crew to hoist the fish over the rail.
“It was a monster! One of the largest ever caught,” Joshua Jorgensen, owner of BlacktipH Fishing, exclaimed in a news release issued Wednesday. “The fish floated to the surface and we all started screaming. We didn’t realize how difficult it would be to bring this fish in the boat.
“It took four grown men to lift this fish over the gunnels.”
For Jorgensen and Jason Boyll, the catch of a 294-pound Warsaw grouper fulfilled a BlacktipH filming quest that began with an unsuccessful 100-mile offshore expedition in 2019.
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The two tried again in January 2020, and reeled a monstrous grouper 150 feet from the sea floor before the hulking fish dashed back into bottom structure and broke the line.
Warsaw grouper are found in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, south to Brazil.
But catching the larger fish presents a challenge, in part, because there aren’t as many as there used to be (the current bag limit is only one per vessel). But also because the true giants are found at great depths and rarely stray from the safety of structure.
Jorgensen and Boyll set out from Fort Myers on Jan. 22 with Capt. Gord Daniher and a crewman aboard Daniher’s 42-foot boat. They ran for four hours to a spot called “Pulley Ridge,” where Boyll dropped a banded rudderfish more than 400 feet to the bottom.
The bite was almost immediate.
“A giant Warsaw had taken the bait!” Jorgensen wrote. “Jason started cranking as hard as possible to prevent the monster from breaking us off on the bottom. After an incredibly intense 10-minute battle, Jason managed to bring the fish 150 feet off the bottom before being completely exhausted.
“I switched with Jason and continued cranking the fish to the surface. It took both of us to reel in this monster.”
The men wrestled the fish into a cooler and arrived at Fort Myers the next day. They used a tractor to hoist the grouper onto the dock.
Said Jorgensen: “The scale read 294 pounds, which means this fish was well over 300 pounds when we caught him. These fish normally lose 10% of their body weight before we can get them to the dock.
“It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen in person. The fish was longer than me, well over 7 feet in length.”
For the sake of comparison, the Florida state and all-tackle world record for Warsaw grouper stands at 436 pounds, 12 ounces. That fish was caught off Destin in the Gulf of Mexico in December 1985.
–Images courtesy of BlacktipH Fishing