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 Track. He rigged three heavy-duty spinning rods with reduce tilapia as bait, after which solid 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 had 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, Track was hooked to the largest fish of her life.
“Earlier than that evening, Emilie’s largest 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 deliver 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 almost 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.”
Track 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 a number of pictures of Track 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 priceless as a stay useful resource … I hate to estimate fish weights, however I’d say it was near 300 kilos.”
That estimate, whereas unconfirmed, falls according to among 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 Sources) places the fish’s tough whole weight at both 312 or 285 kilos.
Theoretically, this is able to put Track’s alligator gar in rivalry for the world report. The IGFA all-tackle world report 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 data in each a males’s and a girls’s division, and the largest-ever gar report authorized within the girls’s division weighed round 132 kilos.
Track’s fish most 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 shouldn’t be eligible for world-record consideration. Nonetheless, Myers thinks it might 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 one 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 Track’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 Track landed eight extra alligator gar between 4 and 6 toes lengthy.
Myers wouldn’t reveal the precise spot the place he and Track 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 keen to share is that it’s a brackish feeder stream that dumps into Galveston Bay someplace in Harris County.