A guided trip on British Columbia's Fraser River has produced what its captain calls the largest white sturgeon ever landed and measured, and the catch broke a benchmark the same outfit set on the same river five years ago.
The fish, brought in this week by the Chilliwack-based charter company Sturgeon Slayers, taped out at 11 feet, 8.2 inches in fork length with a 60-inch pectoral girth, and was estimated to weigh between 1,100 and 1,200 pounds. It was tagged and released. The previous mark, also held by Sturgeon Slayers, was an 11-foot-6.5-inch fish with a 55-inch girth caught in 2021.
The common thread across both outings is Kevin Estrada, who founded Sturgeon Slayers in 2008 and serves as co-chairman of the Fraser Valley Angling Guides Association. He was aboard for both record catches, half a decade apart.
"The significance of both these record-setting fish is that conservation works. These fish are getting bigger and the fact that both had not been caught and tagged before is incredible," Estrada said. "This latest fish is far more than a record. It demonstrates what happens when conservation, responsible angling, scientific collaboration and public awareness come together to protect a species that has survived for millions of years."
White sturgeon are the largest freshwater fish in North America. The Fraser population can live well past a century and grow to extraordinary sizes, but the fishery runs on strict catch-and-release rules and careful handling. Sturgeon Slayers said its trips are built around minimizing fight times, teaching calm landings and recovering each fish before release.
"The group operates with a simple truth: that there is no future in guiding without conservation," the company said. "Every trip it makes on the Fraser River is guided with respect for the fish, the ecosystem, and the responsibility that comes with access to one of the world's most important white sturgeon fisheries."
The latest fish was logged through the Sturgeon Monitoring and Assessment Tagging Program, a long-running tagging effort whose partners include the guides association, the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, InStream Fisheries Research, the Province of British Columbia and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Because neither record fish had been tagged before, both add fresh data to a database used to track growth and movement across the system.
There is some debate about how to frame the "world record" label. As the outdoor outlet BroBible noted, anglers in British Columbia measure from the nose to the fork of the tail, while many U.S. records are taken from nose to tail tip, which can inflate a total-length figure. Even by the more conservative fork-length standard, the outlet wrote, this is the longest white sturgeon ever measured anywhere.
The Fraser has a habit of giving up giants. Last summer it produced a sturgeon nicknamed "Ghost," a fish estimated to be more than a century old, caught and released near Lillooet, in a catch widely reported across Canadian media. Catches like that, and like this week's, are exactly why guides keep returning to the river, and why the conservation program around it keeps tagging every fish that comes to the boat.
For Estrada, the size is almost beside the point. The fact that a second uncaught, untagged giant turned up five years after the first, he argues, is the real headline: a sign that decades of habitat protection, research and angler education are letting one of the planet's oldest fish keep growing.
