The six-man crew aboard the Trading Desk, a 60-foot Hatteras, left Alabama’s Orange Beach Marina around mid-morning on Aug. 14. They ran straight offshore into the Gulf’s blue waters and started trolling.
“We wanted marlin, but that day we caught some dolphin, blackfin tuna and a 35-pound wahoo,” one of the anglers, Robert Fritze, tells Outdoor Life. “Later that afternoon we hooked a barracuda. As we were bringing it in, a 200-pound-class blue marlin chased the hooked ‘cuda and tried to eat it, but unfortunately we didn’t hook that fish.”
The anglers kept fishing through the afternoon, targeting offshore oil rigs in water that was around 1,500 feet deep. The rest of the crew included Harold Wells, Jamie Boyd, Robert Parks, Wes Hagler, and Robert Fritze’s dad, Ron, the boat’s owner and captain.
Their plan was to keep fishing over the next couple days, so they slept on board. After dinner and before they went to bed though, they put out a deep-water swordfish setup with a 50-pound-class rod and a wide spool Shimano spooled with 80-pound test.
“It had a squid bait with a light stick, and we heavily weighted it,” says Robert, 31, who lives in Birmingham. “Then we sent it down several hundred feet as we drifted that night.”
Everyone was fast asleep around 4 a.m., when Robert first heard the reel’s clicker going off. He jumped out of bed and ran to the back deck, where he grabbed the rod and jumped into the fighting chair.
“I really wasn’t [planning on] being the guy fighting the fish,” he says. “It just sort of happened that way.”
The fish fought deep and strong at first, but it wasn’t long into the battle when it came up 40 feet behind their boat.
“Its bill and head came up out of the water, and I swear, it looked right us,” Robert recalls. “That’s when the fight really started.”
With the boat’s overhead deck lights illuminating the water, they saw the fish again when it jumped.
“It looked like a dinosaur when it came out of the water. And that’s when my buddy Harold said, ‘That’s a tank!’”
The swordfish fought like one, too, running deep and taking hundreds of yards of line. Robert would work the fish toward the surface and then it would dive, peeling drag and all the line he’d been able to gain. This went on for about four-and-a-half hours.
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“I thought the fish was never going to stop running or get tired,” Robert explains. “We had a mark on the braided line at 800 feet, and he stayed down at that depth for a long, long time — just straight down.”
Finally, long after the sun had risen, the fish began to tire, and Robert gained some line back. After one final long run, Robert worked the sword close to the stern, and the fish came up on its side, then rolled over, belly-up.
Because they hadn’t planned on catching a giant swordfish, they were a little unprepared, having only small gaffs. Fortunately for them, the fish was whipped. They put two smaller gaffs in it and pulled the sword through the boat’s transom door and onto the deck.
“We were all hooting and hollering and back slapping after we got the fish in the boat,” Robert says. “Then we realized that we couldn’t fish any longer because it covered the whole deck. We had to get it back to Orange Beach. We knew it was huge, and the idea that it was a record started to sink in.”
They ran back to Orange Beach Marina where Robert’s swordfish weighed 550.3 pounds on certified scales. It measured 150 inches long with a 62-inch girth. That weight far exceeds the current Alabama record swordfish of 448 pounds, caught off Mobile by Wendell Sawyer in 2006.
Robert says they’ve filled out the required paperwork for the fish to become the new Alabama record swordfish. It has not yet been approved officially by the state.
With more days of fishing planned, the crew had Robert’s swordfish frozen in a tackle store locker and headed back offshore.
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“My buddy Jamie Boyd caught a sailfish that next day – his first billfish ever, which was really special for him,” Robert says. “A record swordfish, and a first sail for a buddy made the trip really fantastic.”
Robert said he plans to have a mount made of his pending record swordfish, but there may be a bit of a problem with that.
“I really don’t know where we can find the wall space to hang a mount that big.”
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