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 Music. He rigged three heavy-duty spinning rods with minimize tilapia as bait, after which casted them out into the backwater bayou.
“I’ve fished that spot for years, and it produces [a lot] of nice fish,” Myers tells Out of doors Life. “And situations had been good for alligator gar that night time.”
Round 10:30 p.m., one of many rods went down. And earlier than she even realized what she had on the road, Music was hooked to the largest fish of her life.
“Earlier than that night time, 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 fingers 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 advised me she thought the rod was going to soften into her fingers.”
Music lastly maneuvered the outsized gator gar into shallows, the place Myers obtained 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 couple of pictures of Music mendacity beside the huge fish, they launched it again into the bayou.
“Emilie was ecstatic,” stated Myers. “We don’t kill or weigh alligator gar as a result of they’re too beneficial as a dwell 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 number of the formulation used to estimate a fish’s weight. Plugging the gar’s size and girth into two of these conventional formulation (one used by Trout Unlimited and the opposite by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources) places the fish’s tough complete weight at both 312 or 285 kilos.
Theoretically, this could put Music’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 record authorized within the girls’s division weighed round 132 kilos.
Music’s fish more than likely 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 may very well be the largest alligator gar ever caught by a feminine angler wherever.
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“It’s the third largest I’ve put a visitor on,” Myers told 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 ft within the final 4 years, says that Music’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 stored at it till round 3 a.m., and Music landed eight extra alligator gar between 4 and 6 ft lengthy.
Myers wouldn’t reveal the precise spot the place he and Music caught the gar. However he says it wasn’t the Trinity River, which is among 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.