I don't know if these two anglers are going to break a world record, but they've caught one of the biggest alligator gars I've ever seen. Just take a look at that monster above and tell me it doesn't look prehistoric. The fish looks downright scary, almost like it could swallow a small child.
At 153-pounds, it's certainly bigger than several small children. Anglers Art Weston and Captain Kirk Kirkland (what a name, right) hooked the monster using an ultra-light line. They may have just landed a new world record for alligator gar. They also broke the record for the heaviest freshwater fish ever landed on a two pound line.
The International Game Fish Association say the alligator gar record is pending. But for Weston, it's all in a days work. he's submitted 81 world-record entries through his career as a fisherman. Speaking with Outdoor Life, he already has a world record for all-tackle alligator gar and record for every men's line-class.
"That was kind of our goal — to get into a fish that was above 110 pounds, but not too big ... and, you know, Kirk's goal was to catch one around 111 pounds. He didn't want to fight anything bigger than we had to," Weston told the outlet. "The 2-pound record that I had previously, we caught it on Choke Canyon, and that was a brutal fight. It was well over two and a half hours, and both of us remember not liking it."
Alligator Gar Fight
The two anglers managed to haul in the alligator gar on April 8 in the middle of a fishing trip. They hooked the fish at Lake Livingston in Texas.
"We set the drag very low," Weston explained. "It's a situation where you can't rely on the force you put on the fish. You have to put just enough pressure to keep them swimming and tiring themselves out."
They didn't hook the alligator gar without a fight. It dragged them two miles across the lake in a three-and-a-half-hour battle.
"We should have lost her. Because the second time, when Kirk was able to grab the leader, I had dipped my rod tip down, and the line twisted all the way around the tip in multiple coils," Kirkland says. "And he's like, 'I can't hold her!' and so I had to drop the rod between my legs, and I just barely got the last coil off the tip at the last millisecond."
However, the two want to land a 200-plus-pound alligator gar.
"I don't know if we'll ever get a 200 [on 2-pound], right? I mean 153, that's a big fish," he says. "And Kirkland, he'll argue that he works harder than I do when we're using those light lines ...You should see the look of murder in his eye when I talk about going after another two-pound record. He just hates it."
