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 forged 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 circumstances had been good 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, Music was hooked to the most important 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 palms 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 large 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 palms.”
Music lastly maneuvered the outsized gator gar into shallows, the place Myers received 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 Music mendacity beside the large 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 precious 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 consistent 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 Sources) places the fish’s tough whole weight at both 312 or 285 kilos.
Theoretically, this is able to put Music’s alligator gar in competition for the world document. The IGFA all-tackle world document 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 ladies’s division, and the largest-ever gar document authorised within the ladies’s division weighed round 132 kilos.
Music’s fish most certainly 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 isn’t eligible for world-record consideration. Nonetheless, Myers thinks it could possibly be the most important 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 instructed Chron. “I hold 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 good friend 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 enormous fish, they saved 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 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.