Ryan Stogner of Walker, Louisiana, and his buddy Jacob May booked captain Kyle Landry of Fish Venice Charters for an afternoon chasing tripletail on July 1. The anglers ran to several different oil platforms off the popular Gulf port, finally reaching a spot where big tripletail lurked.
Stogner tossed a live shrimp with a cork to a platform in 8 feet of water and soon hooked a heavyweight 25-pound tripletail, which locals call blackfish. Landry followed with a 12-pounder, according to the Louisiana Sportsman, and soon Stogner had another strike from a tripletail — a much bigger one.
During his drag-burning bout with the fish, Stogner was able to muscle it away from potentially snagging on the oil rig and breaking the line. He brought it boatside and Landry netted the tripletail.
That 38-inch “blackfish” later weighed 37 pounds and is touted by Louisiana anglers as the fourth largest tripletail ever caught in the state.
Few places in the world offer as good fishing for record-class tripletail as the Gulf Coast region from Louisiana through Mississippi and into Alabama. While the IGFA all-tackle world record tripletail — which weighed 42 pounds, 5 ounces — was caught in South Africa in 1989, any fish weighing 25 pounds or more could potentially earn certain IGFA line class records.
Excluding that all-tackle record, only five other tripletail weighing more than 30 pounds are on the IGFA books. Curiously, four of those came from Florida’s central Atlantic Coast. But the northern Gulf Coast has plenty of huge tripletail for anglers who seek them.
For example, the 93rd Annual Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo out of Dauphin Island ended Sunday. The top tripletail brought to the scales was a 34.69-pound fish caught by angler Hayes Cornelius. Another 32.2-pound and a 27.8-pound tripletail also were caught and entered in the tournament.
Twenty pounders are regularly caught in Mobile Bay, and along the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. Such giants caught in such a small region is remarkable, considering tripletail have worldwide distribution throughout tropical and subtropical regions.
“Why this area has so many big tripletail is the million dollar question that we have no real answer to,” Dr. Jeff Plumlee tells Outdoor Life. Plumlee is an assistant professor at Louisiana State University and a fisheries specialist. “The Louisiana Coast, especially around the town of Venice, is a Mecca for tripletail. But so are a lot of other Gulf Coast river mouth areas, like the Mobile River in Alabama, the Pearl River in Mississippi, and Texas’ Matagorda Bay.”
Plumlee says tripletail are very short lived, with most giants in the 30-to-40-pound class only living to five years.
“They are eating machines. They are ambush predators that grow fast. They just float near a structure like an oil rig platform, a crab pot line and wait for food that comes by with current or tide.”
Plumlee says a 50-pounder that was caught (though not on the record books) off Mississippi was only five years old. The oldest fish he knows about was just eight years old.
While tripletail are less well-studied than some other iconic Gulf species, Plumlee says most blackfish spawn near river mouths from late May to early November.
“They migrate for spawning and the larger ones come to different regions at different times,” he says. “The Venice area may differ, however. We don’t know for sure, but fish in that area may not migrate at all. They may just live and stay in the region, which is why they grow so consistently big.”
He calls the Gulf the leader for big tripletails.
“No other place I’m aware of has such huge and consistent catches of tripletail – though there may be some spots we don’t know about because people don’t talk about them.”