Steven Vicknair had to work late as a lower Mississippi River tugboat captain on July 9, so he couldn’t get offshore to compete in the 2026 Blue Boot Rodeo with his fishing crew family until the next day. But when he finally did get out on the water, he had a record-breaking day.
“We headed offshore on my father-in-law’s 36-foot Cape Horn boat he calls ‘Butcher’ because he owns a butcher shop,” Vicknair tells Outdoor Life. “My 12-year-old daughter Nora and my fianceé Ellen Voiron were on board. My father-in-law Gary Voiron was at the helm running his boat.”
Vicknair says they didn’t get out to their offshore fishing spot until mid-afternoon on that day of the competion, and the first place they tried deep jigging didn’t produce even one strike. The Blue Boot is the largest fishing rodeo in Louisiana, and one of the more popular fishing events in the Gulf of America.
“That’s when we moved to a different rocky ledge area in about 400-feet of water,” says Vicknair, age 41, of Belle Chasse, La. “It was my first drop with a big slow-pitch 1.5-pound yellow jig. It sunk to the bottom, I jigged about twice and a fish slammed it.
“It was touch and go for a while, trying to get that fish off bottom. And I was using a high-speed Shimano conventional reel, rugged rod, and 60-pound braided line with 120-pound test leader.”
He battled the deep fish for about 10 minutes, and the fight was so tough he thought it might have been an amberjack.
“But once I got the fish off the bottom, I got it pretty fast to the surface,” he says.
A video was made of the fish coming topside and being worked to their boat and gaffed by Gary. It clearly shows the massive size and girth of the relatively rare grouper.
Record Yellowedge Grouper Caught in Louisiana
“We weren’t chasing records, but I sent my brother Scott some photos of the fish, and he got all excited when he started looking at the state records,” Vicknair says. “We weighed the fish on a typical boat spring-loaded scale and it registered 50 pounds. That’s when I thought maybe it really was a record fish.”
It was late when the anglers headed back to Grand Isle, much too late to find a certified scale to weigh the fish. The next day they had other friends and family scheduled to run offshore starting at dawn and fishing in the rodeo. So, Vicknair’s grouper couldn’t be weighed until late Saturday afternoon – a full 24 hours after he’d caught it.
On certified scales at Grand Isle Marina his yellowedge grouper weighed 48 pounds, measuring 47 inches long. It easily surpasses the current Louisiana record of 46.22 pounds caught in 2024.
The IGFA All-Tackle world record yellowedge grouper weighed 48 pounds, 9 ounces, caught in 2012 off Alabama.
Vicknair kept his huge grouper well preserved in slush ice during the 24 hours before it was weighed on certified scales. But the fish was bleeding, and it easily could have lost some weight during that 24-hour period.
Getting a state fisheries biologist to positively identify Vicknair’s grouper as a yellowedge also took some time.
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“I couldn’t get the fish to Bill Hano, a biologist for the state, to certify that it was a yellowedge grouper until Tuesday,” Vicknair says. “I kept it in ice and well preserved until he saw it and verified it was a yellowedge.”
Rather than mounting his pending Louisiana record yellowedge grouper, Vicknair is having a full-size ink art print made of it. An artist in Ocean Springs, Mississippi is doing it, and Vicknair will have it back to hang in his home in several months.
“I’m also having a skull mount made of its enormous head – kind of like a European deer mount with just the big bones,” he explained. “We also cleaned and have eaten some of the grouper – and it’s great.”
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