It was simply after darkish on Aug. 31 when Paul Myers, a widely known fishing information on the Texas coast, settled right into a spot on a privately owned shoreline together with his consumer Emilie Tune. He rigged three heavy-duty spinning rods with reduce tilapia as bait, after which forged them out into the backwater bayou.
“I’ve fished that spot for years, and it produces [a lot] of nice fish,” Myers tells Outside Life. “And situations have been excellent for alligator gar that evening.”
Round 10:30 p.m., one of many rods went down. And earlier than she even realized what she had on the road, Tune was hooked to the largest fish of her life.
“Earlier than that evening, Emilie’s greatest fish was a 6-pound bass,” says Myers, a full-time schoolteacher in Houston who’s been guiding part-time for eight years. “She had her arms full with that gar. It took her about half-hour to carry it into the shallows and land it.”
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Myers says the huge gar made a number of lengthy, highly effective runs, stripping off practically 100 yards of 100-pound braid. However the 1/0 hook held quick.
“She had a tough time with that fish. She instructed me she thought the rod was going to soften into her arms.”
Tune lastly maneuvered the outsized gator gar into shallows, the place Myers acquired a rope across the fish and pulled it onto shore. They measured the gar at 100 inches lengthy with a 50-inch girth. And after snapping just a few pictures of Tune mendacity beside the huge fish, they launched it again into the bayou.
“Emilie was ecstatic,” mentioned Myers. “We don’t kill or weigh alligator gar as a result of they’re too beneficial as a reside useful resource … I hate to estimate fish weights, however I’d say it was near 300 kilos.”
That estimate, whereas unconfirmed, falls in keeping with a few of the formulation used to estimate a fish’s weight. Plugging the gar’s size and girth into two of these conventional formulation (one utilized by Trout Limitless and the opposite by the Wisconsin Division of Pure Assets) places the fish’s tough whole weight at both 312 or 285 kilos.
Theoretically, this is able to put Tune’s alligator gar in rivalry for the world file. The IGFA all-tackle world file for the species is 283 kilos, and that fish was caught on Texas’ Sam Rayburn Lake in 2023. However the record-keeping group additionally acknowledges a number of line-class world information in each a males’s and a ladies’s division, and the largest-ever gar file authorised within the ladies’s division weighed round 132 kilos.
Tune’s fish probably dwarfed that weight, however as a result of they weren’t utilizing an IGFA-approved chief and since they by no means weighed the fish, her gar is just not eligible for world-record consideration. Nonetheless, Myers thinks it may very well be the largest alligator gar ever caught by a feminine angler anyplace.
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“It’s the third largest I’ve put a visitor on,” Myers instructed Chron. “I maintain in touch with most guides, and I requested. No person is aware of of a feminine angler catching an 8-footer earlier than.”
Myers, who has landed 9 fish over 8 toes within the final 4 years, says that Tune’s gar additionally had a tag in it. He explains that his pal tagged the fish round two or three years in the past, when it measured 97 inches lengthy with a 43-inch girth.
After releasing the large fish, they saved at it till round 3 a.m., and Tune landed eight extra alligator gar between 4 and 6 toes lengthy.
Myers wouldn’t reveal the precise spot the place he and Tune caught the gar. However he says it wasn’t the Trinity River, which is likely one of the better-known alligator gar fisheries within the state. The one clue he’s prepared to share is that it’s a brackish feeder stream that dumps into Galveston Bay someplace in Harris County.
