Fishing the deep waters of Prince William Sound in Alaska, Keith DeGraff hooked up to what he thought was a halibut, not the target fish of black cod. Turns out, it was neither.
DeGraff landed a shortraker rockfish that qualified as a state record, beating the old mark of 39.1 pounds caught in 2013 by Henry Liebman of Seattle, as reported by Saltwater Sportsman.
DeGraff first weighed the fish back at a remote lodge where his fiancée Betsey Wilson and three friends were staying. Unofficially it weighed 48 pounds. But it would be three days before it could be weighed officially on a certified scale. So DeGraff bled the fish.
“I wasn’t going to taint the meat for the sake of a record,” DeGraff told Saltwater Sportsman.
With an Alaska Department of Fish and Game representative present, the shortraker rockfish weighed in at 42.4 pounds on a certified scale, still besting the previous record by over three pounds.
The International Game Fish Association world record for a shortraker rockfish is 44.1 pounds caught by Angelo Sciubba in 2017 near Glacier Bay.
DeGraff described the battle to Saltwater Sportsman, saying he was fishing 1,000-feet deep for black cod and “was immediately disappointed, because the way it was fighting, it felt like a halibut.
“With a thousand feet of line out, it can be hard to tell. This one pulled drag. I got it up about 75 feet and he took 40 feet. I’m fishing on pretty big gear, so for a fish to pull drag, I knew it was a decent size, which made me think it was a halibut between 30 and 35 pounds.”
Saltwater Sportsman stated the shortraker is one of 33 rockfish species in Alaska and dwells 500- to 1,500-feet deep among boulders along the state’s continental shelf.