It was about 7 p.m. on July 3 when Cooper Clark hooked a fish he hoped was a bluefin tuna. He was trolling out to sea with his uncle Robert Clark and his cousin Ashton Clark in Robert’s 27-foot Sailfish center-console boat named “Baby Girl”.
They were trolling the famous “Jackspot”, a well-known reef area 21 miles southeast of Ocean City, Maryland, famous for good catches of white marlin and bluefin tuna.
“We had some friends who caught some bluefin in that area a few days before we went out,” explains Cooper. outdoor Life. “We were trolling with 50-wide spool reels and caught a bunch of big bluefish and a kingfish. Then about 7 o’clock I hooked a strong fish, I thought it was a small bluefin tuna.”
Cooper says the fish fought hard, holding the line, and he didn’t know it was not a bluefin until he got near the boat and Ashton caught it.
“He brought it with him and to my dismay it was not a tuna but a false albacore,” says Cooper, 19, of Ocean City, Maryland.
He later placed the fish on ice with the intention of using it as bait as false albacore is not noted as preferred table fare. They left fishing at 8 p.m. and were almost back to their home port in Ocean City when Cooper started thinking about the fish he had caught.
“I checked state records using my cell phone, and it turned out the record catch was in July 2025 and was 26 pounds,” says Cooper, a second-year accounting major at Salisbury University.
Knowing that their fish could be a state record, the crew iced Cooper’s catch and weighed it at Sunset Marina the next day. There it was inspected and weighed and certified by Maryland DNR biologist Gary Tyler. The 36-inch-long fish weighed 28.2 pounds, and is now accepted as a new state record for this species.
False albacore or little tunny are pelagic gamefish of the Atlantic Ocean common from New England to Brazil, South Africa to Great Britain. They are renowned for being tough fighting fish.
The IGFA all-tackle world record is 37 pounds. The IGFA 50-pound line class world record for the species is open, meaning that if Cooper used 50-pound test line on his 50-wide fishing reel, his catch could qualify as an IGFA line class world record if he decides to enter it.
“The fish had lost some weight from the time I caught it until it weighed it back the next day,” Cooper says. “While on the ice it revived several large 6-inch squid, and it also lost some body fluids due to gaffing.
“I’m checking out the mount made of fish, because state record fish doesn’t come along every day.”
