Fishermen seeking to catch a fish of a lifetime or personal best on a charter boat off Orange County, Calif., appeared to hit the jackpot last week, especially Adonis Soriano, who landed a record-size 364.5-pound bluefin tuna—known as a super cow in sportfishing lingo.
A super cow is one that weighs 300 pounds or more, and it is rare to catch one off Southern California as fishermen there typically take long-range trips from San Diego well into Mexican waters to catch these behemoths.
Soriano’s catch would have shattered the California state record had he not used the rail for leverage. Also, it wasn’t weighed on a certified scale but taped out at 81 inches in length with a 61-inch girth, thus producing the estimated weight.
The state record is 245 pounds caught in 2016, or about when big bluefin tuna started showing up in Southern California waters. As it was, Soriano’s catch was a record among the Newport Beach sportfishing fleet.
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Soriano was one of 18 anglers aboard the Thunderbird out of Davey’s Locker in Newport Beach that fished on a two-day trip behind San Clemente Island, and they caught loads of big bluefin tuna.
Charter master Jeff Price told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors that all the anglers were going after the fish of a lifetime or personal record, and several succeeded. They totaled 65 bluefin tuna with seven of them weighing over 100 pounds, four over 200 pounds (known as a cow), and the one over 300.
“We use 200-pound test and dangle a flying fish from a helium balloon to catch these monsters,” Price told For The Win Outdoors, describing a method that gets a bait dangling on the surface away from the boat. “On this trip, we saw literally thousands of fish jumping out of the water feeding on small anchovies, although there are so many fish, they’re not easy to get to bite your bait. When they’re feeding on the small anchovies and Shelbys that’s usually all they want so you need to be very lucky for them to bite your bait.”
Then there were several lucky anglers, Soriano among the luckiest.
“The 364.5-pound bluefin took just under one hour to land,” Price said. “The fight was intense. He peeled off hundreds of feet of line on his first run. The large fishing reel was actually very warm from all of the tension.
“He laid the rod on the rail and put one knee down on the deck and started cranking the handle as hard as he could. It gets to be exhausting, but the longer you have the fish on, the higher the chance you will lose it. He did an excellent job landing this fish.”
Soriano told For The Win Outdoors the fight was “intense” and “like no other fight I had fought before.”
“[The fish took] long runs that almost took all the line off my reel,” Soriano said.
It wasn’t the only fish he caught; he landed another in the 35-40-pound range. The other was his biggest ever, surpassing a 90-pounder he had caught previously.”
Photos courtesy of Davey’s Locker and Adonis Soriano.