Click picture to massively enlarge (photo from Shorpy).
Giant Black Sea Bass (Stereolepis gigas), Santa Catalina, California, 1900.
Weight of 384 pounds, and caught on rod and reel.
The all-tackle world record for this species is 563 pounds.
Click picture to massively enlarge (photo from Shorpy).
Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola), Santa Catalina, California, 1910.
Est. weight is 3,500 pounds, and probably harpooned or caught in a drift gillnet set for swordfish.
The all-tackle world record for this species is 5,071 pounds.
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** Fisheries at the End of the Line
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Sadly we shan't be seeing these records being broken in the 21st Century.
ReplyDeleteYou will not. back in the 70s I'd see ones half that size coming in Channel Islands Harbor.
ReplyDeleteSun Fish are not really consitered a game fish. I've never heard of anybody taking one. They are fairly common when you go out for a sail. Power boats, displaced ones, might hit them, never heard about it though.
The Giant Black Sea Bass has been protected in California since 1982, and on Catalina there is a now a small dive industry where people strap on tanks to see them in their habitat, like the do giant groupers that prowl the wrecks and reefs in South Florida. The really big fish are very old, but with almost 30 years of protection under our belt, things are looking up even if these fish will not be boated and hung at the end of a dock (and the buried in a pasture to rot).
ReplyDeleteThe Ocean Sunfish has mostly been decimated by big drift nets. They eat jellyfish and such and are not good swimmers, and where big nets are used to catch swordfish the bycatch in these nets (i.e. the animals killed and dumped overboard to rot) may be 70% Ocean Sunfish, with far more bycatch than swordfish. We need to BAN drift nets and bottom nets entirely in my opinion. I do not eat fish other than farmed Tilapia due to environmental concerns. Commercial fishing in our oceans is mostly a criminal act, akin to chopping down an entire mountain forest and killing everything in it in order to get 90 pounds of backsrap off a few deer. The ionly upside to the Ocean Sunfish is that they have more eggs than anything on earth, and so if we changed our methods of fishing they would probably come back in 50to 100 years time.
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You can tell I am from a younger generation, I look at those fish and think OMG fish come that big? I thought that salmon were big?
ReplyDeleteDid they use drift gill nets in 1910?? Well they did in the 70s, they must have thrown the sunfish out to sea with the sharks they caught as collateral kill- shame and I guess Fish and Game or Fish and Wildlife realised with some protest that that was not good.
ReplyDeleteIn the early to mid 70s they harpooned or speared Swordfish off a "plank" I not sure why that method stopped.
And the Black Sea Bass I saw on the stern of small Radon dive boats in the 70s. I suppose some were taken on a line and pole, dunno.