A man from Laterrière had the catch of his life on Saturday when he pulled a 120-pound Atlantic halibut from the waters of Saguenay Fjord, the biggest catch there since the start of the winter season, which is well underway.
• Also read: [À VOIR] After 24 hours a fishtail end for the fishermen of La Baie
“It’s like winning the lottery 6/49 and it was the fight of my life to pull this beast out. I won’t hide the fact that I was emotional when we released it,” says Hugo Morissette.
As usual, the fisherman set up his fishing tent and began teasing the fish at 800 feet in the Sainte-Rose-du-Nord sector.
“After 10 minutes of fighting, we started enlarging the hole. It took us about an hour and 15 minutes to figure it out. In the end the three of us shot at it. Luckily I had a good team and good gear,” says Mr. Morissette, who had 1,000 feet of line under the ice.
On the menu
As required by regulations, the mastodon has been handed over to the Fjord Museum for scientific analysis.
The fisherman is supposed to pick up his fish on Tuesday.
“I’ll have it arranged at a fishmonger’s because I don’t want to lose anything. That should make 80 pounds of good fish to eat,” he spits.
Ice fishing stories followed one another in the Saguenay Fjord this weekend.
La Baie fishermen became the craftsmen of an impromptu reality show Sunday through Monday as they attempted to launch a giant fish estimated to weigh more than 150 pounds live on social media for 23 hours.
Unlike fairy tales, the story ended in a fishtail. Mathieu Bouchard and his collaborators eventually allowed the unidentified specimen to escape five feet from the surface.
Maybe a shark
The president of OBSL Promotion Pêche, Rémi Aubin, thinks it could be a shark.
“My first theory is that at the end there was a huge shark, here it’s 18 or 19 feet. Or it’s a big fish with something heavier hooked after the fish,” he analyses.
The specialist explains that the salt water of the Saguenay is the habitat of several species of fish. Cod, redfish and turbot are the most commonly caught.
However, there are huge fish populations, including Atlantic halibut, which can reach up to 700 pounds.
“We also have a population of Greenland sharks, it’s the third largest shark in the world,” confirms Mr. Aubin.
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