The crowd at MacDougall's Cape Cod Marine Service had been told to expect a grander. What came off the crane in Falmouth on the evening of August 19 was considerably more than that.
The scale, IGFA certified, read 1,260 pounds. The Atlantic blue marlin hanging from it - more than 11 feet from lower jaw to tail fork - is the heaviest ever brought ashore on the US East Coast. The nearest comparison is a 1,228-pound fish from North Carolina. The Massachusetts state record it replaced, set in 2015, was 873 pounds. The all-tackle world record, a 1,402-pounder taken off Brazil in 1992, survived by 142 pounds.
It came out of Atlantis Canyon, about 100 miles off Cape Cod, aboard the charter boat Castafari. Captain Damon Sacco had been trolling after a morning of yellowfin when he saw a fin he initially read as a shark.
"Then I got a better look at it and thought, dang, that thing's pointed," Sacco said. "But that's too big for a marlin."
His client, Walter Chapman of Plymouth, took the rod and stayed on it for about three hours. Sacco handled the boat, a job he described with no ceremony at all: "My role for most of the adventure was to drive the bus around and yell at people." The fish left two holes in the transom with its bill on the way home. He calls them war marks.
Blue marlin are only briefly available this far north. Water temperatures in the Northeast are too cold for most of the year, which is why Walt Golet, who directs the University of Maine's Pelagic Fisheries Lab, treats the catch as an outlier rather than a trend.
"I don't suspect there will be a whole lot of blue marlin caught in the Atlantic in general that are going to top 1,200 pounds for the next several years," Golet said.
The marlin's head was sent to his lab for otolith analysis. Golet's early estimate puts the fish somewhere between 25 and 30 years old - a figure that has driven a good deal of the argument since. Readers responding to On The Water's dockside report, which first carried the weight and the photographs, pushed back at a breeding fish of that vintage being killed to settle a number on a scale.
Chapman divided the meat among about a dozen people afterwards and started hunting for recipes, on the reasonable grounds that "I wasn't going to eat a 1,200 pound fish all by myself." Chowder is likely.
Among the spectators who had wandered down to the scale was Katie Curran of Falmouth, who described the weigh-in as spectacular.
"People fish their entire lives and never come close to a catch like this," she said. "Hats off to Captain Damon Sacco and the crew on the catch of a lifetime."
