Fishing deep for swordfish, Jeremiah Elliott made a rare catch off the coast of North Carolina that has been certified as a state record and could become a world record—and he didn’t even know he had hooked up.
Elliott was fishing with his brother Zachary Elliott and two friends on a 30-foot boat some 50 miles offshore, as reported by FOX News and the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.
“We were dropping squid about 2,000 feet down, and we didn’t realize we had a fish on [the line],” he told FOX News. “When you bring a fish up from that depth, a lot of times their stomachs expand, and they float.
“We didn’t even know there was anything on [the line] until it came to the top.”
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Once they landed the fish, they had no idea what it was until they started for shore and got to within cell service and looked it up online.
What he caught was a bigscale pomfret (Taractichthys longipinnis), a fish typically found in the Atlantic Ocean at depths from 165 feet to 3,280 feet.
“It’s a weird-looking fish,” Elliott told FOX News. “It’s like prehistoric, almost.
“It’s very rare to catch them in North Carolina. People catch them in Florida.”
Upon reaching shore, the fishermen found a weigh station. The bigscale pomfret weighed 26 pounds, 11.4 ounces
The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries certified the fish as a state record, as there was no previous state record for this species.
However, the International Game Fish Association world record for a bigscale pomfret is 20 pounds, 10 ounces caught off Florida in 2004 by W. Gordon Davis.
Elliott told FOX News he’s submitted his catch as a world record to the IGFA. So that record is pending.
Photo courtesy of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries.
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