a pretty impressive, errr, tail, not to mention head, body and fins, from my neck of the woods …
courtesy of MyNorthwest and Seattle News:
It’s a fish tale, but it’s a great one.
A Puyallup man won’t tell a fishing tale of “you should have seen the one that got away” … because it didn’t.
Geoff Meredith had family in from Virginia last week and decided to take them out on a weekend excursion in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
They got skunked on the first day, but Day 2 was an entirely different story.
After a 45-minute fight and a lot of help, Geoff reeled in a “barn door halibut.”
So how big was this halibut? 178 pounds.
“That’s probably a once in a lifetime fish for me for sure,” Meredith told MyNorthwest Weekend’s Larry Rice on Saturday.
The halibut was 6’2″ tall and 74-inches wide – obviously a tough catch for Meredith, who had to use a harpoon to catch the enormous fish.
“It was pretty wide,” Meredith said. “I mean we got it up, we got close to the boat – about 20 feet below the boat and me and my brother looked down and we realized how big it was. And I just started yellin’ �real up the other lines and back up the boat’ because she just took off and started strippin’ my line right out.”
On the third day, the party managed only to catch a “tiny” 45-pounder.
Barefoot Blogger 
May 30, 2011 @ 14:36:14
That’s a beautiful fish – when I was an avid fisherman – all 9 years of me – I used to DREAM of catching a halibut.
I hope they put it to good use, i.e. feast on it, rather than just pose next to it.
May 30, 2011 @ 15:06:13
@aubrey – Yeah, no word on the feasting, freezing or the like. Irony is that he caught that beauty a few days too early for the local Halibut Derby, which awards $5,000 for the biggest catch; last year’s was a “lightweight” 88 pounds.
May 31, 2011 @ 03:38:33
Whoa! That’s a lot of Hiame zushi in the making.
May 31, 2011 @ 12:18:15
@Expat – Ain’t that the truth! Grilled or raw, hirame is my absolute favorite fish! Oh, were that he my brother-in-law about now!
Jun 01, 2011 @ 20:01:08
Wowza.