It took Brett Rutledge nearly an hour to boat one of the biggest sharks in Alabama history on July 22. While competing with a team of anglers in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, Rutledge hauled in a tiger shark weighing roughly 1,019 pounds.

If the catch holds up to scrutiny by the state, Rutledge’s tiger shark will set a new Alabama record for the species. The current state-record tiger shark, according to the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, weighed 988 pounds. It was caught near Gulf Shores by angler Larry Eberly in 1990.

“We caught seven sharks this morning, and this happened to the biggest,” Rutledge told Fox-10 News over the weekend. “I’m excited … and if it does hold, it will be a new state record, so that would be cool.”

No official length measurement was available, but judging from the photo of the anglers standing beside it, the tiger shark appeared to be well over 10 feet long. It also had some tremendous girth, along with a huge, blunt-nosed head that’s typical of big tigers.

Spud Marshall, who was fishing with Rutledge during the tournament, said they caught the shark while trolling. It turned a tough day of tournament fishing into one for the record books.

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“It was a fight, but we got it,” Marshall told reporters. “We went out to catch swordfish, but the bite just wasn’t happening. So, on our way in we decided to set some lures out, and we caught it on the way in.”

This year marks the 90^th annual Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. Billed as “the largest fishing tournament in the world,” the three-day event brings in over 3,000 anglers each year. It’s located on Dauphin Island where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico.   

The world-record tiger shark was caught by Kevin Clapson on in March, 2004 near Ulladulla, Australia. Its official weight was 1,785 pounds, 11 ounces.

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Angler Justin Hall of Reidsville, North Carolina has officially broken the state record for channel catfish. He caught a 27-pound, 7-ounce channel cat from a farm pond near his home on May 21, which the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission recently certified as a new state record, according to FOX Carolina.

Hall had fished the farm pond for years, but he seldom caught catfish there, according to NCWRC. Then, in mid-May, his 13-year-old son caught a huge channel cat that weighed an estimated 25 pounds. They let the fish go without realizing that it could have made history.

“I told a friend about my son’s catch, and he told me it might have been big enough to beat the state record,” Hall said.

So, Hall went back to the pond the following week. Using a stout Big Cat Fever casting rod and a Zebco Big Cat XT spincast reel, he tossed out a ball of bread dough for bait.

Eventually, a fish took the bait. Hall muscled the catfish near shore, where his wife was waiting with a landing net. But the net wasn’t quite strong enough for a fish of that caliber.

“My wife went down to the waterline to bring it in … [but] it bent the net,” Hall told WRAL.

The 27-pounder measured 36 1/4 inches long, with a 24 7/8-inch girth. The previous state record channel catfish weighed 26 pounds, and was caught from the Neuse River in July 2021. NCWRC keeps records for five catfish species: the blue catfish, the brown bullhead, the channel catfish, the flathead catfish, and the white catfish.

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Channel cats are a popular game fish in the U.S. They’re the official state fish of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Tennessee, and the “unofficial state fish” of Iowa, due to their status as the most abundant game fish in the state. They’re also targeted by many North Carolina anglers, despite their classification as a non-game fish by the NCWRC.

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The Maryland Department of Natural Resources certified a new state-record Northern snakehead Friday. The fish weighed 21 pounds and was caught from a kayak by Eastern Shore resident Damien Cook. Falling into the state’s Invasive Division, this fish replaces the previous state record—a 19.9-pound snakehead taken by a bowfisherman in 2018.

Cook caught the oversized snakehead while kayak fishing a tidal river in Dorchester County on July 5. (The DNR did not name the river in a news release, but referred to the county as “one of the state’s hotspots” for snakeheads.) He was using 30-pound braid and casting an Addiction Baits chatterbait lure known as the “Cooker.”

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“I thought it was just your average 30-inch snakehead when I first hooked the fish,” Cook told the DNR. “It pulled hard but I had the advantage of being close and I got it in the net pretty quickly.”

Far from average, the fish had a total length of 36 inches and an official weight of 21 pounds. This technically makes Cook’s snakehead a world-record contender, as the International Game Fish Association lists the all-tackle world record as a 19-pound, 5-ounce fish caught from Virginia’s Potomac Creek.

There are currently no other IGFA records listed for northern snakehead. This is partly because the species, which is native to Asia, has long been viewed as an invasive menace, and only some state agencies recognize them in their record books. Attitudes among anglers are changing, however, with a growing number of people targeting these highly predatory fish.

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“The Northern snakehead is an invasive species now common throughout Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay tidal waters,” the Maryland DNR explains. “Snakeheads have become popular for sportfishing in Maryland because they fight hard and strike traditional lures that are often used for largemouth bass.”

Northern snakeheads are one of two species of snakehead that have been in U.S. waters for the last 20 years or so. (The other is the bullseye snakehead.) Because of the threat they pose to native fish species, many state game agencies encourage and, in some cases, require anglers to kill and harvest the snakeheads they catch. The transport of live snakeheads is also illegal under federal law, as the fish can survive out of water for days as long as their skin stays moist.

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Twenty-seven-year-old Ria Bignell has broken the record for the largest carp ever caught by a female angler in Britain, the Daily Mail reports. Bignell caught the record-breaking common carp in early June. It weighed 63 pounds, 11 ounces.

“It was humungous, I couldn’t believe the size of it. It was over half the size of me,” Bignell said of the fish, which has been nicknamed “the Big Common.”

At the time, Bignell was on a week-long fishing trip with her husband, Lee. The two were fishing at Waterside Fishery in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, which is home to two managed carp lakes that are open to the public only through exclusive bookings. (A weeknight of fishing there starts around $145, while a full week costs between $950 and $1,684, according to their website.)

Since carp tend to feed nocturnally during the summer months, the two were fishing at night when Bignell hooked the carp. She landed the fish around 2 a.m.

“I just thought it was a tiddler on my line at first because it didn’t start to swim away,” Bignell explained. “I would have expected it to take a few hours to catch a really big fish, but it only took 20 minutes for me to get it close enough to have a proper look.”

The two then photographed, measured, and weighed the big carp before releasing it into the lake. (Like most privately managed carp lakes in Britain, Waterside rules require all fish to be released.)

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“I had to have some help to lift it up so I could hold it for the photos,” Bignell said. “It felt like I had a proper workout afterwards and my arms ached for two days.”

In addition to being the heaviest carp ever caught by a female angler, Bignell’s fish was less than five pounds shy of the largest carp ever caught in Britain. According to the British Record Rod-Caught Fish Committee, which maintains a separate record book for carp and other “coarse fish,” the biggest carp of all-time was a mirror carp. That fish weighed just over 68 pounds and was caught in 2016.

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There’s a new world-record muskie on the books. Earlier this year, the International Game Fish Association certified Derek Balmas’ 53.15-inch muskie as the new all-tackle length record for the species. Balmas caught and released the trophy muskie while fishing the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York on Nov. 8.

A fishing guide on the St. Lawrence, Balmas was supposed to be leading a trip for Water Wolf Charters that day, but his client cancelled. He decided to go fishing anyways and called up his friend Mike Muehelemann, who’d never caught a muskie before.

After setting out from the ramp in Clayton that afternoon, the two put out six lines and started trolling. They found fish soon enough, landing a 48-inch muskie and a 35-incher within the first couple hours. Then, around 3 p.m., something hammered one of their eight-inch diving plugs.    

“When it hit, we didn’t know if we had weeds on the board or what was going on,” Balmas told New York Upstate. “So I ran to the back and went to grab for the rod, and of course the rod started doubling over.”

The big muskie stayed deep for most of the battle. After roughly 30 minutes, Balmas netted the fish and hauled it into the boat. The two anglers photographed the fish, took a series of measurements, and released it. They decided not to weigh the muskie but estimated its weight around 60 pounds.

“We feel the longer you have them out of the water, the worse it is on the fish,” Balmas explained. “We just got our pictures we needed for IGFA, then back down into the depths she went.”

The IGFA certified Balmas’ word-record muskie in April, but news of the record began circulating widely this weekend. His fish edges out the previous catch-and-release record (which was also pulled from the St. Lawrence River) by less than inch.

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To be fair, Balmas’ record muskie is the longest to be certified by the IGFA, but it’s far from the longest muskie that’s ever been caught and released. Last March, an angler in West Virginia set a new state record with a muskie that measured over 55 inches. And the Minnesota catch-and-release record, which was also caught last November, measured more than 58 inches long.

Balmas’ fish also falls short of the IGFA all-tackle weight record. Weighing 67 pounds, 8 ounces, that muskie was caught from a lake in Wisconsin in 1949. It measured 60.25 inches long.

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A nearly 6-pound tiger trout has become the new Arizona record, the Arizona Game and Fish Department announced Tuesday. Not only did angler Carl Erickson pull the marble-patterned fish from the same lake that produced the last one, but it’s now the second time in six months that the state tiger trout record has been busted.

Ericson caught the fish at Woods Canyon Lake on a crawfish-imitating crankbait. Erickson thought his big tiger trout could perhaps break the state record for the species, so he contacted AGFD personnel to notify them of his catch.

Erickson’s trout weighed 5 pounds, 15.4 ounces on certified scales and measured 23.5 inches long. AGFD sportfish program director Curt Gill confirmed that Ericson’s fish has been officially weighed, measured, and certified as Arizona’s new tiger trout record. The previous record tiger trout was four ounces smaller than Erickson’s fish. Brian Morgan of Glendale, Arizona, caught the 5-pound, 11.8-ounce fish in December 2022. Prior to that, the record hadn’t been broken since May 2020.

Woods Canyon is a 55-acre mountain lake located 7,500 feet above sea level about 30 miles northeast of Payson. It is one of a series of canyon waters in the area, known collectively as the Rim Lakes. AGFD stocks it with brown, rainbow, and tiger trout.

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Tiger trout are a sterile hybrid between a female brown trout and a male brook trout. The cross can occur naturally, but most tiger trout are produced in hatcheries for stocking. The vast majority of tiger trout are caught in the U.S., but IGFA line class records for the species have come from the United Kingdom and Australia, too. An angler in Wyoming broke that state’s tiger trout record this month, and Cathy Clegg caught the world-record IGFA tiger trout from Washington State’s Loon Lake in August 2022. The fish weighed 27 pounds, 6 ounces.

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After months of waiting, Lea Anne Powell learned Friday that the lunker largemouth she caught in February was officially accepted as a new women’s line-class world record by the International Game Fish Association. This makes her roughly 12-pound fish the heaviest largemouth bass ever caught by a woman on 12-pound test.

“I submitted everything in March, and it was official on June 23,” Powell told KETK News earlier this week. “I had been driving them insane by calling. I’ve been very anxious you know, I wanted it.”

Powell’s journey into the record book began on February 28, when she went out on O.H. Ivie Lake with Dalton Smith, a close friend and fishing guide. It was their third day in a row fishing the sprawling reservoir, which has been on fire so far this year. (At least 10 other bass over 12 pounds were caught from O.H. Ivie during February alone.) The duo was using Smith’s Livescope to pinpoint trophy fish, and at one point that morning, Powell watched the screen as a giant largemouth homed in on her soft plastic lure.

“Once I set the hook he was like, ‘Oh my God, you caught a giant,’” she said. “We were both freaking out because it was hooked 45 feet from the boat and 15 feet down on 10-pound line with a spinning rod. Which, if anybody knows fishing at all, that’s a very hectic situation.”

After a stressful 10-minute battle, they boated the bucket mouth, put it in Smith’s live well, and ran to a nearby RV park where they found a certified scale. They recorded an official weight of 12 pounds, 3 ounces, and then released the fish back into the lake. For Powell, who also tournament fishes, it was easily the biggest bass she’s ever caught.

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It wasn’t until the following month that she learned her personal-best largemouth was also a world-record contender. Heeding the advice of a friend, Powell submitted all the required information, including witness statements, photographs, measurements, and a line sample. This last detail turned out to be especially important, as she explained that the 10-pound Seaguar Red Label line she used “actually tested up to 12 pounds” when examined by the IGFA.

Curiously, the IGFA record book lists the official weight of Powell’s bass as 12 pounds, 0 ounces, instead of 12 pounds, 3 ounces. Either way, it’s more than enough to replace the previous women’s line-class world record: a 9-pound, 1-ounce largemouth caught in Mexico in 2021.

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Texas angler Dace D’Onofrio caught his first fish in May while out in the Gulf with his father Michael. It was a black grouper, and the fish was recently certified as a new state record in the Junior Angler Division by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

TPWD Angling Recognition Coordinator Grace Simms tells Outdoor Life that D’Onofrio landed the fish while aboard a charter boat on May 28. The grouper, which had an official weight of 76.55 pounds and measured 57 inches long, was verified as a record by the agency on June 16. And because D’Onofrio caught it while fishing with his dad, TPWD highlighted the catch in a social media post on Father’s Day.

“This is the first black grouper record for the Junior Division, and we’re excited about his catch,” Simms says. She explains that the category was established nearly 20 years ago to recognize anglers under the age of 17.

In order to have the record certified, D’Onofrio’s black grouper had to be verified by TPWD fisheries biologist Christine Jensen. This was important because the Gulf of Mexico is home to several different species of grouper and it can be difficult to distinguish one species from another.

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Black grouper in particular are a highly sought after game fish because they make excellent table fare and can reach sizes of over 100 pounds. In fact, some of the biggest black grouper ever caught have come from the Texas Gulf Coast. This includes the IGFA all-tackle world record, which weighed 124 pounds and was caught by angler Tim Oestreich II in 2003.

Because the IGFA also maintains a junior angler record book for anglers 16 and under, D’Onofrio’s black grouper could also qualify as a new junior world record for the species. The current junior world record is a 34-pound, 12-ounce black grouper caught in the Bahamas in 2009.

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Well before daybreak on June 8, anglers Bill Proulx and Ed Pyle eased away from Four Mile River Marina near Lyme, Connecticut. They returned to the dock that evening with a heavy summer flounder (locally known as a “fluke”) that put Proulx’s name in the state’s saltwater fishing records book. The 15-plus-pound fish beat out the previous state record by a little under a pound.

Proulx, a retired police officer in his 60s, was at the wheel of his Parker boat that morning as they headed into Long Island Sound. A well-traveled angler, freediver, and the father of a local charter captain, Proulx fishes religiously for flounder. He headed about a mile offshore to a spot where he knew fish would be spawning, and they started jigging over a sand bottom in roughly 80 feet of water.

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They caught a limit of sea bass and some large flounder over the course of the day. One of the flatfish that Proulx caught stood out from the rest, and he guessed it weighed 12 pounds or more. But with the fish still biting, he just flipped the large fluke into his cooler and kept on catching.

Back at the dock, Proulx grabbed his hand scale and weighed his biggest fluke of the day, which came in at 15.3 pounds. With most businesses already closed, he had to wait until the following day to have his fish weighed on a certified scale. He brined and iced the fish in a cooler and then called his friend Ed Lombard, who owns Hillyer’s Tackle Shop in Waterford.

“That evening Bill called me and told me hooked a good fluke,” Lombard tells Outdoor Life. “He was excited and came in the next day to have it weighed.”

Proulx’s fish weighed 15.3 pounds on Lombard’s scale, but the state-record application required him to have a printed receipt of the fluke’s weight. So, he took it to a certified scale at a nearby fish market, which also registered 15.3 pounds. This was enough to replace the standing state record for the species, and Proulx’s fluke has officially been accepted by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

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Lombard says Proulx caught the record fish on his favorite lure: a 100-gram Daiwa Rock Rover jig topped with fresh squid and spearing. He adds that the current joke around the tackle shop these days is the net that Proulx used to land the flounder.

“He came in a few days before his trip and bought a huge landing net,” Lombard says. “One of the young guys in the shop kidded him about buying such an oversized net for fluke, saying he didn’t need one that big just for flatfish. And Proulx just said, ‘Well, I’m gonna need a big net for the big fluke I’m gonna catch.’”

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The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission just certified a new state-record common carp. The nearly 40-pound fish was caught in April by fisherman Chuck Hensel.

Hensel, who lives in Valentine, caught the carp from the Merritt Reservoir on April 18. Hensel was fishing alone from the bank, using wax worms when he hooked it. After a tough battle, Hensel knew he had a potential state record on his hands, so he took the fish home and froze it, according to NGPC fisheries outreach program manager Daryl Bauer.

“The next day he drove the frozen fish to our Nebraska state fish hatchery in Valentine, about 25 miles from the lake,” Bauer tells Outdoor Life. “There, Zach Brashers, a facility fisheries manager, identified it as a common carp, weighed, and measured it.”

Hensel’s common carp measured over 40 inches long and weighed 39 pounds, 8 ounces. This replaces the previous Nebraska record for common carp, which was caught in May 2019 and weighed 34 pounds, 13 ounces. Angler Robert Busk caught that fish from a private pond in Washington County, and he was using a nightcrawler as bait, according to the NGPC fishing records book.

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“[Hensel told me] it was quite a struggle landing the fish,” Bauer said. “He asked a couple guys in a boat nearby to come to shore and help out and shoot a photo.”

Bauer added that he’s unsure if Hensel was specifically targeting carp that afternoon. After Hensel’s record carp was certified, he offered the fish to the state so it could be mounted and displayed somewhere. Due to the high cost of a replica mount, however, the agency was unable to take Hensel up on his offer.  

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