Ryan Stogner and his friend Jacob May of Walker, Louisiana book Captain Kyle Landry fish venice charters Chasing tripletails on the afternoon of July 1. Fishermen rushed to several different oil platforms from the popular Gulf port, eventually arriving at the spot where the large tripletail was hiding.
Stogner threw a live shrimp with a cork onto a platform in 8 feet of water and soon hooked a heavyweight, a 25-pound tripletail that locals call a blackfish. Accordingly, Landry followed up with a 12-pounder. louisiana sportsman, And soon Stogner got another blow from the tripletail – a huge one.
During his drag-burning encounter with the fish, Stogner was able to prevent it from potentially getting stuck on the oil rig and breaking the line. He brought it over to the side of the boat and Landry netted the tripletail.
That 38-inch “blackfish” later weighed 37 pounds and was billed by Louisiana fishermen as the fourth-largest tripletail ever caught in the state.
Few places in the world offer as good fishing for record-class tripletail as the Gulf Coast region from Louisiana to Mississippi and Alabama. While the IGFA all-tackle world record tripletail – which weighed 42 pounds, 5 ounces – was caught in South Africa in 1989, any fish weighing 25 pounds or more could potentially earn some IGFA line class records.
Excluding that all-tackle record, only five other tripletails weighing more than 30 pounds are in the IGFA books. Interestingly, four of them came from the mid-Atlantic coast of Florida. But there are plenty of giant tripletails along the northern Gulf Coast for fishermen who look for them.
For example, 93third Annual Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo Ended up Sunday off Dauphin Island. The top tripletail brought to the scales was a 34.69-pound fish caught by angler Hayes Cornelius. Another 32.2-pound and 27.8-pound tripletail were also caught and entered into the tournament.
Twenty pounders are regularly caught in Mobile Bay and off the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. The capture of such giants in such a small area is remarkable, given that the tripletail has a worldwide distribution in tropical and subtropical regions.
“Why there are so many large tripletails in this area is the million dollar question that we have no real answer to,” Dr. Jeff Plumlee says outdoor Life. Plumlee is an assistant professor and fisheries specialist at Louisiana State University. “The Louisiana coast, especially around the city of Venice, is a mecca for tripletail. But there are also many other Gulf Coast estuarine areas, such as the Mobile River in Alabama, the Pearl River in Mississippi and Texas’ Matagorda Bay.”
Plumlee says tripletails are very short-lived, with most giants in the 30 to 40-pound class only living about five years.
“They’re eating machines. They’re ambush predators that move fast. They simply swim near a structure like an oil rig platform, a crab pot line and wait for food that comes with the current or tide.”
Plumlee says the 50-pounder caught in Mississippi (though not in the record books) was only five years old. The oldest fish he knows of was just eight years old.
While tripletails have been less well-studied than some other iconic bay species, Plumlee says most blackfish spawn near the mouth of the river from late May to early November.
“They migrate to spawn, and the older ones come to different areas at different times,” he says. “However, the Venice area may be different. We don’t know for sure, but the fish in that area may not migrate at all. They may just settle in and stay in the area, which is why they consistently get so big.”
He calls the bay the leader for big tripletails.
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“There are no other places I know of that have such large and consistent catches of tripletail – although there may be some places we don’t know about because people don’t talk about them.”
