A detailed cousin of the amberjack, the fish was greater than twice as heavy because the earlier state document
Hayden Mundy holds up the brand new Georgia state-record Almaco jack. {Photograph} courtesy of Georgia DNR
Georgia angler Hayden Mundy and his crew received an early begin on March 14, departing Half Moon Marina at 1 a.m. They motored down the coastal river and headed 90 miles offshore, the place round 6 a.m., they began trolling over a reef backside in 180 ft of water.
“The climate and water have been stunning that day, calm and water clear,” Mundy, 24, tells Outside Life. “We trolled awhile, and hooked and misplaced a pleasant wahoo. Then we caught just a few blackfin tuna. About mid-day the motion slowed, so we determined to alter ways and deal with and catch some backside fish.”
Mundy was joined by his associates Jake Lee, Hugh Robinson, and Lee’s four-year-old son, Finn. The anglers positioned Lee’s custom-built 33-foot boat, the Leegull Restrict, over a bunch of suspended fish they noticed on sonar. As an alternative of anchoring, they used the Spot-Lock function on the trolling motor to maintain them in place.
“We have been working a ledge drop off in 190 ft of water, and I used to be utilizing an [8.8 ounce] NLO Fishing Scoop Jig,” says Mundy, a realtor and licensed constitution boat captain. “I used to be bringing my jig up by means of the water column and received a success about 50 or 60 ft deep.”
Mundy battled the fish for about 10 minutes. Then he introduced it topside the place Lee gaffed the fish and hauled it aboard.
“It was a giant fish, and I believed it was an amberjack, which we caught a number of of that day,” Mundy explains. “However Jake is an skilled angler, and he thought it was an almaco jack [which look similar]. We put it on ice and stored fishing, and we caught a [bunch of] different smaller almacos.”
The 4 anglers fished the remainder of the day, returning to Half Moon Marina round 8 p.m. They have been whipped after 19 hours on the water.
“Jake was fairly certain my fish was an almaco jack, and it takes an knowledgeable to inform them other than amberjacks,” Mundy says. “We cleaned all our fish besides the massive one I caught. The subsequent morning, we took it to the Georgia DNR workplace in Richmond Hill to have it positively recognized, weighed, and measured.”
A state official confirmed it was certainly an almaco jack that weighed 19-pounds 10.53 ounces. It measured 37-inches lengthy with a 21-inch girth. The DNR announced that Mundy’s jack was a brand new state document on Monday, and it shatters the earlier document, which was caught in 2023 and weighed simply 7 kilos 7 ounces.
As Mundy alluded to, Almaco jacks are thought-about uncommon as a result of few are positively recognized, and most anglers mistake them as amberjacks. The one variations between the 2 species are the variety of gill rakers and ray fins, that are tough to rely.
Mundy’s says he’ll have a reproduction mount made from his jack, and that the document fish remains to be in his freezer.
“I’ll thaw it, fillet it, and we’ll eat it,” he says, “as a result of we by no means waste fish.”
