Big fish is potential No. 7 all-time in Louisiana
When Matt Leerkes of Baton Rouge wants to do battle with a big “dinosaur” – his joking term for a big bottomfish – he gets Joey Maciasz to take him to “Jurassic Park.”
So it was no surprise last weekend when Leerkes hooked up and landed a real T-Rex: a 94.2-pound cubera snapper that will jump into the Louisiana record books in the all-time top 10 for the species, probably at No. 7.
This Jurassic Park is no isolated island, but a rather large area of coral bottom about 120 miles southwest of Port Fourchon, part of an area known as Garden Banks. Maciasz, who runs Down the Bayou Charters out of Golden Meadow, heads there whenever Leerkes brings a party on his 44-foot Fincast sportfishing catamaran.
“We go with him about once a year and have real fun trips; we go dinosaur hunting,” Leerkes said. “You send a live bait down to the bottom in Jurassic Park, you’ll catch a dinosaur.”
Leerkes caught his prehistoric-looking fish at around noon last Saturday, July 20. His group of friends had already caught plenty of amberjack, red snapper and grouper when they hooked up with a big fish around 11:30 in 350 feet of water.
“We were sifting through the amberjack,” Leerkes said. “Every five or six AJs, we’d catch a grouper or a snapper.”
Two cuberas
For the first big fish, Leerkes’ son, Luke, and buddy Porter Bell took turns on the rod, which was mated to an electric reel, and not long thereafter, they boated a 42-pound cubera snapper – a relatively rare catch.
“Joey had only caught two (cuberas) before, and he does this for a living,” Leerkes said. “The only two he caught, he caught the same day. We thought there might be potential for another, so we got the big rod out and put the electric reels up.
“We got back on top of the reef and got out the big rod and a (Shimano) Talica 50 reel (mated to a Bo’s Custom rod), and I dropped a live hardtail down (on a 14/0 circle hook). He took it. It took me about 15 minutes to get him up, and he fought the whole time.
“We freaked out like little girls at a Justin Bieber concert. We started to party.”
Maciasz had a working knowledge of exactly how big the snapper was, so when the trip ended, he motored back to Hurricane Hole Marina on Grand Isle.
“They were having a tournament, so we weighed him on their official scales,” said Leerkes, who had the fish measured at 51 inches long after it pulled the scales down to 94.2 pounds. “Joey thought we might have hit a spawn, a full-moon spawn, where the snapper were above and out of the rocks.
“You never feel like you’ve got one until he’s in the boat,” he said. “A big fish is going to break you off 80 percent of the time. And they have hard mouths. The hook fell out when we got him in the boat.”
Louisiana’s fish records
According to state fishing records kept by the Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association, Leerkes’ cubera snapper slots in at No. 7 all-time. The state record – which is also the all-tackle world record recognized by the International Game Fish Association – is Marion Rose’s 124½-pound fish, caught in June 2007 on the Garden Banks. It’s one of four triple-digit cuberas to come from Louisiana waters.