This one didn’t get away.
A Cape Coral couple’s fishing trip out of Bud N’ Mary’s Marina in Islamorada turned into a record haul after an eight hour fight landed a swordfish that tipped the scales at 757.8 pounds.
Florida’s previous swordfish record — 672 pounds — also happened in the Florida Keys and dates back 41 years, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
In a Facebook posting, Captain Nick Stanczyk details the tremendous catch that happened aboard his boat, the Broad Minded, on March 31 in a trip booked by customers Bill and Debbie Lussier.
The Lussiers are retired fishing captains from Maine who moved to southwest Florida about eight years ago and wanted to try their hand at trying to catch swordfish, the Fort Myers News-Press reported.
Stanczyk writes that once the lines were in the water that Sunday it didn’t take long for him to realize that they had a hit — a big one that he estimated might be bigger than 400 pounds.
“The next couple hours went by quick. The fish would dive deep toward the bottom and then swim all the way to the surface. Bill worked the reel and helped put line on when he could. When the fish would make a fast run he would back off the drag a little, and when she would settle down he would bump up the drag and add more pressure with his hands on the line. Debbie gave moral support and had the camera ready to capture the beast.”
The swordfish that Stanczyk calls the fattest one he’s ever seen would drag the Broad Minded for some 20 miles over several hours before the catch was a certainty.
“It’s an absolute sea monster,” Stanczyk later says in a video posted to YouTube.
As for the all the meat on a swordfish weighing more than 700 pounds — it didn’t go to waste.
“There were probably 100 or 150 people at the dock when we came in, so we gave a lot of it away right then, Debbie Lussier told the News-Press.
While the Lussier-landed swordfish is a Florida record by about 145 pounds, the world record comes in at 1,182 pounds, caught in Iquique, Chile, in 1953, according to the Miami Herald, citing information from the International Game Fish Association.
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