World record red grouper

Angler Steve Jackson was ecstatic when he recently made a Facebook post that he had just been issued a state fishing record.

“Well it’s finally official. I am now the Louisiana state record holder for red grouper caught on a rod and reel,” he wrote. “Huge shoutout to Capt. Joey Davis of Relentless Sportfishing for putting us on lots of nice fish that day.

“Best of all, I had my son with me to see it happen and push to get it in the (record) books. Thanks, now it’s time to go back and do it again.”

Jackson, 52, a salesman from Benton, Arkansas, was entertaining four business customers and his son on Aug. 12 when they drove 10 hours to Venice, Louisiana to try for tuna. The weather was poor that morning for trying tuna, but Capt. Joey Davis said they could try for bottomfish when the weather laid down a bit at 9 a.m.

Out they went 20 miles offshore on Davis’ 33-foot boat to 120-feet of water. With bottomfishing boat tackle and using pogie baits they started catching big scamp grouper, snapper and some triggerfish.

“I went to the stern of the boat after fishing at the bow for a while, dropped a bait down, and wham, something strong hit it,” said Jackson. “When I brought the

World Record Saltwater Fish (Complete Chart)

Abig thank you to the folks over at International Game Fish Association for compiling the data that helped build our World Record Saltwater Fish and World Record Freshwater Fish chart. If you are a fan of fishing, then you already love the challenge of finding fish, targeting them, and then vying to catch them.

The untold story of this article is very much the thrill of battling a monster fish only to find out it is the biggest fish of its kind ever caught, and it’s on the end of your rod. What has not been said is that any angler with a line in the water can break any of these saltwater fish records or freshwater fish records. So, if you are interested in adding your name to the list of record holders, you’d better get to fishing.

“We jigged up this fish from around 270 feet of water,” wrote Capt. Fernando Almada (Catch 22 Fishing), based in San Carlos, Mexico, at the upper end of the Sea of Cortez. “We had been jigging up smaller fish, mostly snappers, and suddenly hooked this grouper. It fought hard at first, then became dead weight.”

Almada said they do encounter these fish, which are called baqueta locally, “but we usually see them smaller than this, often brown, not with the deep red color.”

“What species is it?” Almada asked Salt Water Sportsman.

So we consulted an expert on fishes of California and Baja, Dr. Milton Love.

He said: “That looks like a very large gulf coney (Epinephelus acanthistius), which, as you noted, are usually called baqueta in the Gulf of California and points south. ‘Acanthistius,’ by the way, means ‘sail spine’ in Greek, an apt name for that big dorsal fin.”

They’re seldom caught north of Baja, but are fairly common on both sides of the peninsula. “These are solitary, rocky reef dwellers,” Love said, which probably don’t travel over a large area. “Unfortunately, gulf coneys are very heavily fished wherever they are found and are clearly overfished in the

A 49-year-old angler from Kingsland, Georgia landed a big red grouper off the Georgia coast on Oct. 4 that crushed the existing state record by nearly seven pounds.

Bruce C. Bartlett Jr.’s 26-pound, 6.4-ounce fish measured 34.5 inches in length. It was certified by Georgia DNR and broke the existing record of 19 pounds, 7 ounces, which was caught by John Wren in 2012.

The IGFA all-tackle world record weighed 42 pounds, 4 ounces. It was caught in 1997 off St. Augustine, Florida.

Bartlett landed the red grouper using a 5-foot, 8-inch Ugly Stik Tiger rod with Shimano Torium reel with 65-pound Power Pro line using a live cigar minnow as bait. His terminal rig was a fish finder sinker slide with an 8-ounce bank sinker to a 100-pound barrel swivel, followed by a 60-pound fluorocarbon leader and 6/0 Eagle Claw circle hook. He was fishing east of Navy Tower R4, about 60 miles off of Cumberland Island, Georgia, aboard his boat Fishslaya Duece.

For the current list of Georgia saltwater fishing records, as well as information on how to submit a catch, visit CoastalGaDNR.org/SaltwaterRecords.

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World Record Fish Weights Chart
Type	Weight	Caught by	Location	Date
African Pompano	50lbs 8oz	Tom Sargent	Daytona Beach, FL	21-Apr-90
Albacore	88lbs 2oz	Siegfried Dickemann	Gran Canaries, Canary Islands	19-Nov-77
Almaco (Pacific) Jack	132lbs	Howard H. Hahn	La Paz, Baja Calif., Mexico	21-Jul-64
American Eel	9lbs 4oz	Jeff Pennick	Cape May, NJ	9-Nov-95