Andrew Bateman was having a decent fishing trip on May 12 around a West Delta rig when some rain forced him to pick up and carry his party to another rig in 400 feet of water.
Bateman, who charters for Paradise Outfitters out of Venice, took off that morning out of Southwest Pass and fished a few rigs in the West Delta area. He had his former deckhand, Daniel Giellen, Daniel’s father Chad, and several other fishermen on board when they started dropping whole blackfin tuna down on extremely heavy tackle, looking for Warsaw grouper. 
“Daniel mated for me for a couple of years, and now he’s at law school somewhere in New Orleans,” Bateman said.
They had caught two yellowedge grouper, a longtail sea bass and two blackbelly rosefish – “rosies” – when a rain squall made them move around 10 a.m.
“I told them, ‘Okay, let’s go to another rig,’ and on the first drop, I put on a 4-foot piece of conger eel I had caught the day before – it was an 8-foot eel. We put it down and immediately got a hit and got broken off in the rig.
“We switched corners of the rig and I dropped a tuna down, and he inhaled it.”
Bateman said multiple anglers, led by the Giellens, took turns on the R.J. Boyle swordfish rod mated with a Penn 80W filled with 150-pound braid, a 100-foot leader of 300-pound mono and a 12/0 circle hook. After 20 minutes, Bateman was about convinced they were hooked up to a big shark until a huge Warsaw grouper popped to the surface.
“And we went out of our minds,” he said.
Boating the big fish
Bateman and crew eventually got the huge fish in his 46-foot Bluefin custom catamaran after a memorable – and unusual – battle. Back in Venice, the 82-inch fish weighed 275 pounds, two pounds short of making Louisiana’s Top 10 for the species. Although he’s battled many big fish before, Bateman said it was the biggest Warsaw of his career.
“He was fighting so hard; he fought the whole way,” Bateman said. “Usually, a (Warsaw) will come up and sort of give up, but he fought the whole way. You could feel him shaking his head the whole time. I thought he was a shark, but when I finally got him away from the rig, he popped up.
“He fought like an ‘old’ fish,” Bateman said. “He wasn’t fired up like an 80-pound amberjack, who gets hooked and goes screaming back to the rig. But we had to get him away from the rig, and I just kind of eased him out of there. I started hard, then I throttled down to maybe 5 miles an hour. He was probably going a couple of miles an hour away from the rig, so we didn’t have to worry about him cutting off.”
