The oldest cliché in fishing involves the mythical “fish that got away,” but one crew just lived a painful but true story along those lines.
The crew of the fishing boat Sensation electrified the crowd of onlookers at the 65th annual Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in Morehead City, N.C., when they brought a giant blue marlin to the scale Saturday night. According to a Washington Post report, it had taken the crew six hours to land the enormous fish.
When tournament officials weighed the marlin, the results were astounding: it unofficially weighed in at 619.4 pounds, far and away the largest fish of the tournament and enough to earn the crew first prize overall. As crew members posed with their catch, they were set to earn some $3.5 million in prize money.
But hold everything. Tournament officials took a closer look at the blue marlin, and discovered it had bite marks.
“It would appear that this fish has been bitten by a shark,” the weigh-in ceremony announcer told the crowd over a loudspeaker.
That revelation sparked a debate among officials about the rules, and on Sunday morning, they finally announced their decision: the catch had been disqualified. International Game Fish Association rules, which tournament officials posted on Facebook, clearly state a fish is ineligible if there is “mutilation to the fish, prior to landing or boating the catch, caused by sharks, other fish, mammals, or propellers that remove or penetrate the flesh,”
So just like that, the crew of the Sensation saw their big payday vanish. Boat captain Greg McCoy told the Washington Post, “It’s the final hour, the final day and we fought with him for six hours. It’s a tough pill to swallow.”
By the way, the winning marlin weighed in at 484.5 pounds, almost 135 pounds less than Sensation’s catch.
