It had been a tough and nearly fishless trip for Capt. Damon Sacco and his four anglers aboard his boat, the Castafari, on Wednesday. Long hours of trolling off the coast of Massachusetts had only produced one yellowfin tuna, which was the target species that day.
“We had to make a move, so I ran east until I saw birds, bait, and tuna,” Sacco tells Outdoor Life. “We really got into the tuna. They were everywhere, and we started loading up on fish to 90 pounds. But they were all sizes.”
The water was about 1,400 feet deep, and the birds and tuna appeared to be feeding on squid.
“That’s what attracted a giant marlin,” says Sacco, a 58-year-old with years of offshore charter experience. “It was there to eat tuna.”
His anglers had just finished catching and boating several tuna, and there only were two lines out when he spotted an enormous fin slicing through the water toward the boat. At first he thought it was a huge shark. Then he saw a neon-blue flash in the clear water.
This Giant Blue Marlin Is Nearly a World-Record
“I knew it was a big marlin, and I grabbed one of the rods we still had out and dropped back to the fish,” says Sacco. “But in the chaos of just catching a bunch of tuna, the two rods with lines still out got switched in the holders. So by mistake, I dropped back a horse ballyhoo bait with a pink squid to the marlin, instead of the marlin lure I wanted to get in front of the fish.”
But the marlin crushed the rigged ballyhoo anyway and immediately jumped.
“When I saw it, I yelled it was a 900-pounder. I was off by over 300 pounds,” he says, laughing. “Then it screamed away on a run. Only seconds after it took the bait it nearly dumped all the line off the reel, jumping three different times completely out of the water.”
Saccco had to turn the boat pronto to chase the fish.
“Thank God the tackle held. It all happened in seconds. My angler Walter Chapman has fished with me previously and got on the rod and did a great job.”
It was a brutal two-hour fight before Chapman got the marlin close. Then one of the mates touched the leader.
“But as soon as the line was touched the fish raced off again,” Sacco said. “The tuna tackle was pretty light for battling a ‘grander’ marlin, so we played the fish slow and easy.”
Sacco said he, his anglers and two mates agreed the fish was well over 1,000 pounds and perhaps was record size.
“Years ago, we released another 1,000-pound class marlin, and ever since I always questioned what the fish actually weighed, thinking it was a possible record.”
That’s why they decided to boat the marlin and have it weighed on certified scales.
“We release 95 percent of the marlin we catch, but this fish was enormous. We wanted it weighed.”
It took another hour of fighting it before the angler could get it close to the boat again.
“The marlin was really whipped, and I doubt even if we’d released the fish, it would have survived.”
After gaffing and boating the massive marlin, the anglers ran the Castafari back to a harbor in Falmouth, where the fish was weighed on certified scales at 1,260 pounds. Sacco says it had a girth of 82 inches and measured 12 feet long from the fork of its tail to the tip of its lower jaw.
The big fish is believed to be the heaviest Atlantic blue marlin ever caught on the East Coast of the U.S. It’s only 142 pounds shy of the International Game Fish Association’s world-record Atlantic blue marlin. That fish weighed 1,402 pounds, 2 ounces. Paulo Amorim caught it in 1992 off the coast of Brazil.
Sacco says the marlin was cleaned and its savory meat was distributed among the anglers, crew, and fishing buddies.
“We smoke a lot of fish, and it’s great prepared like that,” says Sacco, who used to own a restaurant in Boston. “I’ve got the fish’s bill to keep forever, and we’ve made an ink impression of its huge tail on canvas to frame and admire.”
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