A casual fishing trip off Quepos, on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, may have rewritten the snook record book. On May 9, retired American angler Will Hefley was out on a small panga with local guide Captain Ruddy Zapata, slow-trolling live sardines near the mouth of the Parrita River, when a huge Pacific black snook took his bait in roughly 15 feet of water.
The fight was long and stubborn rather than spectacular. "He battled the fish with heavy gear and tough Suffix line for about 30 minutes," said Steve Hoyland of Steve Hoyland's Adventures, who described the day from Texas. "The fish fought deep and tough but never jumped."
The angler himself recalled a strangely quiet battle. "She never surfaced," he wrote in a first-person account for The Tico Times. "Not once during the entire fight, and not even at the boat when we netted her." He described it as 25 minutes "that felt like two hours."
When the snook reached the boat it was too big for the net to swallow, so Zapata seized it by hand and wrestled it aboard — a two-man lift. Weighed on certified scales at Marina Pez Vela, it went 72.6 pounds, 48 inches long with a 32-inch girth.
That eclipses the International Game Fish Association all-tackle record for the species, a 59-pound, 8-ounce Pacific black snook landed in 2014 by Ward Michaels and also weighed at Marina Pez Vela. Of the eight snook species the IGFA lists, Hefley's fish would top them all by more than ten pounds.
It nearly went back. "Hefley wanted to release the fish, but Ruddy talked him into keeping and weighing it for a possible world record," Hoyland said. The hesitation was personal as much as ethical — the record on the line was held by Michaels, a longtime friend who first introduced him to these waters. He called May 9 "simultaneously the greatest and most difficult day of my fishing life."
According to Hoyland, the IGFA paperwork is finished and on its way to the organization's headquarters in Florida. The fish was cleaned and eaten, and a replica mount is planned, perhaps to hang at the same marina that has now weighed both the old record and its likely replacement.
"It's almost sure to be a new Pacific black snook world record," Hoyland said. "There really is no place offering better giant snook fishing than the west coast of Costa Rica out of Quepos." For now the catch remains pending the IGFA's verdict — but the certified numbers already leave the existing record far behind.
