A few days ago, two guys left Rye Harbor and came back with a tale they’ll be telling for the rest of their lives.
Jamie Savage, a fisherman and charter captain who owns the Out Of Line boat, took out a regular customer, Brandon McGirl. They were eying tuna, and departed the coast around 7 p.m. They were in position by midnight, about 10 miles offshore, armed with squid for bait.
But for the next 17 or so hours, there wasn’t much action.
Until…
[Editor’s note: we highly recommend you listen to this story]
Here’s the story, told in Captain Savage’s own words.
A bite
“We had kind of given up on trying new tricks because nothing had been working. So we were just kind of sitting in the cabin talking about the day and how it kind of sucked that [other boats] had caught fish. Not everybody, but half the boats out there had, and we hadn't. Just about dark I was getting ready to put the floodlights on and one of the lines started…We heard the drag start going.”
Courtesy of Jamie Savage
“I tell Brandon, keep reeling”
“We were pretty sure it was a tuna. It was taking quite a bit of line. I had a good steady pace and we untied off the anchor and started following the fish so that it didn't take all our line.
The fish probably ran for about a mile the first 20 minutes of the fight, and we were just backing down on him to stay as close to him as we could and make sure our line didn't get caught on any lobster traps. It was dark out. We couldn't really see. So we were trying to just get close to the fish…Eventually the fish stopped taking line, and we started taking line back.
[Brandon] was reeling for forever. I'm pretty sure his arms were ready to fall off because the fish just kept coming and coming back at us. Pretty sure he reeled in about 800 yards of line. And I tell Brandon, ‘Keep reeling.’ And he did.”
“Ridiculously huge and fat”
“We got the fish spun around and got the tail rope on him and tied him to a cleat. And that's when we knew it was game over.
He's like, how big do you think it is? And I said, I don't know. He's over 100 inches. Maybe 700 or 800 pound? Which isn't uncommon to catch them that size.
I think it was around 10:00 p.m. at night, and we still had the fish in the water behind the boat, and we pulled up to the Rye Harbor fish pier, which has a fish hoist.
So we hooked on to lift him up out of the water with that hoist, and that's when we figured out why we couldn't pull him on the boat. He was just ridiculously huge and fat.”
It wasn't until the next morning we got our buddy to bring a scale down and get a rough idea of how much it weighed: 1,116 pounds. That's the biggest tuna I've ever seen. Definitely the biggest I've caught, and I haven't even seen one bigger than that on anybody else's boat.”
The fish, which measured 114 inches, blew away the previous New Hampshire state record. But because the fish was caught 10 miles offshore, Savage and Mcgirl later were told it doesn’t qualify for official recognition.
The bluefin tuna was packed on ice and sent to a wholesaler, where it will be portioned off and sold for consumption. Savage said he and his buddy were bummed the fish didn’t get an official prize, but they are happy about the money it will bring in -- and the bragging rights. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing, he said. ‘That’s been pretty fun.’
