Capt. Jim Walsh on his 100-foot charter boat, American Classic, left the Hampton, New Hampshire, marina at 9 p.m. Sunday. By 4 a.m. he and his crew of 30 anglers were 100 miles offshore in the Atlantic where they anchored and dropped their baits deep along a ledge.
“We started catching pollock pretty good,” Walsh tells Outdoor Life. “But when the sun got up, the action really kicked in and everyone was catching fish, mostly pollock.”
The anglers had a great morning, and about 10 a.m. Walsh decided to pull the boat’s anchor and drift awhile to see what else they might catch.
“It was a beautify, sunny day and we thought we might catch some bigger fish drifting through the area.”
On board that day was 13-year-old Jackson Denio, an experienced angler and a deck hand for half-day fishing charters for Al Gauron Deep Sea Fishing charters. Walsh is running charter trips through Gauron’s business, and Denio was along for the trip. Denio’s pal, Austin Leaver, was also on board.
“Jackson is a great, hard-working young man, and he wanted to catch something big,” says Walsh, 68. “So he took an 8-pound pollock that he’d caught earlier, put an 8/0 hook through it, and sent it deep off the port side while we were drifting.”
About 10:30 a.m. Denio hooked something large, and everyone on board took notice, including Walsh.
“I knew it was something good, and I yelled to him, ‘That’s not a shark!’” Walsh says. “That young man fought that fish like a champ. There was no quit in him. Lots of men would have passed off that rod because the fish fought so hard. But not Jackson.”
Half an hour later Denio had worked the fish up from the bottom near their boat, where crew members sunk a large flying gaff into it. (A flying gaff detaches from a long pole. The gaff head is attached to a heavy rope, and acts like a secondary, massive hook in a fish.)
“We worked the halibut around to the boat gate amid ship, and opened it,” Walsh said. “It took four of us to haul the fish up and onto the deck.”
The anglers quickly stashed it in a large on-deck cooler. The anglers fished until noon, then headed back to Hampton where they arrived about 6 p.m.
At a fish house near the marina they weighed Denio’s halibut on certified scales. It tallied 177 pounds and taped out at 72 inches long.
The paperwork is being filled out now to certify the halibut as a world-record in the International Game Fish’s youth category (age 16 and under). The IGFA youth record Atlantic halibut is currently vacant, so it’s likely Denio’s fish will become a world-record catch.
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The fish is still whole and frozen, but soon will be cleaned with fresh, succulent halibut fillets available to Denio’s family and friends.
“He did such a great job catching that halibut,” said Walsh. “Jackson only weighs 120 pounds, and he’s 5 feet 9 inches tall. That fish was longer than he is tall and outweighs him by 50 pounds.”