Damon Sacco had never encountered anything resembling the giant fish he and fellow anglers fought for hours in waters off Massachusetts. As it rose from the sea, it looked like a shimmering blue spaceship. Sacco, a longtime Massachusetts charter fishing boat captain, spotted the massive fin breaking the water's surface, and at first he believed he was dealing with an enormous shark. "Then I got a better look at it and thought, dang, that thing's pointed," he said. "But that's too big for a marlin." He was wrong. Sacco and his client Walter Chapman landed what they and others believe is the largest Atlantic blue marlin ever taken off the U.S. East Coast on Wednesday. The massive billfish, more than 11 feet (335 cm) in length, weighed 1,260 pounds (571.5 kilograms) when brought back to land in Falmouth, Massachusetts. That figure was just 142 pounds (64.4 kilograms) short of the world record for an Atlantic blue marlin, caught off Brazil in 1992, according to records kept by the International Game Fish Association. Catching such a giant fish off New England is even more remarkable, said Walt Golet, director of the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab and an associate professor at the university's marine sciences school. Water temperatures are too cold in the Northeast for most of the year, making the window to land a large one extremely narrow. The fish’s head was sent to the UMaine laboratory to determine its age, with Golet speculating that it could fall within the range of 25 to 30 years old. "I don’t suspect there will be a whole lot of blue marlin caught in the Atlantic in general that are going to top 1,200 pounds for the next several years," he said. On the day of the catch, Sacco's charter boat, Castafari, was fishing Atlantis Canyon, an underwater feature along the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off Cape Cod. The highly migratory blue marlin is merely a seasonal visitor to the area, Golet said. The fight against the marlin lasted about three hours and was fought using a rod and reel by Chapman. Sacco said his role for most of the adventure was to "drive the bus around and yell at people." He added that the fish left a couple of holes in the boat's transom with its bill that he considers "war marks." Chapman, a retiree and lifelong fisherman from Plymouth, said the fish's meat was divided among roughly a dozen people, and he is currently looking up recipes for what to do with it. He noted the marlin is unquestionably the biggest fish he has ever fought on a line, and some of it is likely destined for fish chowder. "I wasn't going to eat a 1,200 pound fish all by myself," Chapman said. When the boat returned to the docks, a crowd was waiting, and weighing the fish became a brief spectacle. Onlooker Katie Curran of Falmouth described the sight as truly spectacular. "People fish their entire lives and never come close to a catch like this," Curran said. "Hats off to Captain Damon Sacco and the crew on the catch of a lifetime."
