A pair of seasoned, world-record-chasing anglers just left another mark on the record books. On Tuesday traveling angler Art Weston and Texas fishing guide Capt. Kirk Kirkland caught a giant, 153-pound alligator gar on ultra-light line. The gar is a new pending world record. It’s also the heaviest freshwater fish ever landed on 2-pound test, according to the International Game Fish Association.
Weston tells Outdoor Life that if his 153-pound gar is approved as a new line-class record, it’ll be his 81st world-record entry. The only angler in IGFA history to accomplish a clean sweep of a single species, Weston already has every men’s line-class record as well as the all-tackle world record for alligator gar. (He’s caught every one of those records in Texas with Kirkland.)
Weston says he is now focused on breaking his own records. The 153-pound fish they caught earlier this month would best his current 2-pound line-class record by 43 pounds.
“That was kind of our goal — to get into a fish that was above 110 pounds, but not too big … and, you know, Kirk’s goal was to catch one around 111 pounds. He didn’t want to fight anything bigger than we had to,” says Weston. “The 2-pound record that I had previously, we caught it on Choke Canyon, and that was a brutal fight. It was well over two and a half hours, and both of us remember not liking it.”
By the time they hooked the gar they were after on April 8, it was around midday, and the two had already been fishing for five days straight. They’d spent most of their time on Sam Rayburn Reservoir, which is where they caught the all-tackle world record in 2023, but conditions had them pivot to Lake Livingston, another large reservoir in East Texas with a healthy alligator gar population. Unlike some other well-known gar spots, though, Livingston has a relatively clean bottom with fewer snags, which is key when trying to subdue a huge fish on light line.
“We set the drag very low,” Weston explains. “It’s a situation where you can’t rely on the force you put on the fish. You have to put just enough pressure to keep them swimming and tiring themselves out.”
This translates to a lot of extra work for Kirkland, who uses his boat, The Garship Enterprise, to chase a big running gar and keep tiring it out. In a typical encounter, Weston says, a hooked gator gar will surface every 20 to 30 minutes to gulp air during a fight. This allows Kirkland to eventually get a hand on the bite leader or a rope around the fish’s tail to land it. Weston says they use 6-foot steel bite leaders that have a breaking strength of 175 pounds, as per IGFA regulations. On the business end, they tie on a sturdy j-hook with a piece of cut carp for bait.
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But the fish they hooked on Livingston wouldn’t surface. It just kept on swimming, and by their estimates, the gar pulled Weston and Kirkland at least two miles across the large lake. The battle had dragged on for more than three-and-a-half hours by the time Kirkland got close enough to grab the leader. And then it was almost over in a second.
“We should have lost her. Because the second time, when Kirk was able to grab the leader, I had dipped my rod tip down, and the line twisted all the way around the tip in multiple coils,” Kirkland says. “And he’s like, ‘I can’t hold her!’ and so I had to drop the rod between my legs, and I just barely got the last coil off the tip at the last millisecond.”
After another 20 minutes and a few more leader grabs, Kirkland was able to get a rope around the gar’s tail. They ran back to shore to set up their weigh station, a tripod with a winch, a specialty sling, and a certified scale. The giant gar weighed 153 pounds, and measured 7 feet 3 inches long. They released it back into Lake Livingston.
“This was probably the most difficult catch, in terms of the fight, of my career, even including the 283-pounder. It was just so perilous and it really felt like we were going to lose her … she was just a little too big for that light of line.”
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Weston says that he and Kirkland will keep trying to re-write the record books. Their ultimate goal is to get a 200-plus-pound alligator gar in every record category.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get a 200 [on 2-pound], right? I mean 153, that’s a big fish,” he says. “And Kirkland, he’ll argue that he works harder than I do when we’re using those light lines …You should see the look of murder in his eye when I talk about going after another two-pound record. He just hates it.”
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