Huge yellowedge caught during Blue Boot Rodeo
Steven Vicknair of Belle Chasse proved that the old adage, “better late than never,” can apply to fishing.
Vicknair, a tug boat captain, worked the night of July 9, so he got a late start the next day in the Blue Boot Rodeo out of Grand Isle. Fishing with his father-in-law, Gary Voiron, and his daughter, Nora Vicknair, on Voiron’s 28-foot Cape Horn boat, Vicknair didn’t get out of Grand Isle into the Gulf until around 1:30 p.m.
It didn’t take long to make up all that missed fishing time. At around 3:30, on the second stop they made, Vicknair jigged up a huge yellowedge grouper that is potentially the Louisiana state record: a 47-inch, 48-pound monster.
The fight
Vicknair hooked the fish in 500 feet of water on a yellow JYG730 Slow Pitch jig fished on a Shimano rod and Shimano Tekota reel spooled with 60-pound Power Pro braid and a 150-pound monofilament leader.
“We stopped at a spot in about 400 feet of water first, then we went to our second spot,” Vicknair said. “On my first drop, I sent the jig down to the bottom, jigged it twice, and he smoked it.
“I had trouble getting him off the bottom for about five minutes, and when I finally broke him off the bottom, he started running, more like an amberjack. I had a little conflict in my feelings then. But I finally got his head coming up, he was pretty much like dead weight. It probably took me 15 or 20 minutes to get him in.”
But the excitement wasn’t over on Voiron’s boat. Before Vicknair got the fish all the way to the boat, his daughter hooked up with another grouper a few feet down the gunwale. She fought it all the way in, boating the 36-pound yellowedge, but not before they hooked up again – this time to a 12-pound mahi mahi that followed the second grouper to the surface.
“I had a speckled trout rod on the boat with a popping cork and a beetle,” Vicknair said. “I pitched it to him, and he ate it.”
A delayed weigh-in
Vicknair’s huge grouper, certified by a Louisiana marine biologist, easily breaks the state record, a 46.22-pound fish caught by Louis Chevalier II in July 2024. The margin could have been even greater, but Vicknair and company didn’t get the fish weighed for better than 24 hours.
“We got back real late that night, around 10, and we didn’t get him weighed because there were no scales open,” Vicknair said. “We went out the next morning before the scales opened, and we didn’t weigh him until the next evening, about an hour before the scales closed.
“We knew it was a big fish, but we aren’t a record-chasing group,” Vicknair said. “After we caught it, we had friends telling us it was a state record. I wish we’d gotten it weighed sooner; it might have been the world record. But that’s okay.”
Vicknair didn’t get the fish certified until Tuesday when a marine biologist got a look at the fish and deemed it a yellowedge.
Vicknair’s fish, which was nine ounces lighter than the all-tackle world record, a 48-pound, 9-ounce fish caught in the Gulf off Dauphin Island, Ala., by Tyler M. Kennedy.
In an interesting aside, Vicknair’s potential state-record fish finished third in the Blue Boot’s grouper category, behind a pair of Warsaw grouper – a much larger species.
