Need a Bigger Boat

There are a few fish I’ve encountered over the years that gave us pause—moments when we instinctively knew we shouldn’t provoke whatever it was. Fish we had no business messing with. Encounters like these don’t come along often and seem even rarer nowadays. Sure, there are plenty of folks who will try to catch these monsters for YouTube views and advertising dinero. Some will even spear huge fish underwater without the slightest plan for what to do once the beast is actually in the boat. I call it the “slay the monster” syndrome—most common among shark hunters.

I was introduced to this on my very first charter out of Port O’Connor. Three young guys from a Walmart distribution center—working long shifts, sometimes doubles—showed up with two buckets of beef lung and a .357 Magnum. They wanted a big shark bad. Pass Cavallo was close, but it was April and still chilly. Their beef lung floated away like Styrofoam, drawing hundreds of gulls. Not a shark in sight. We should've fished deeper and drifted the big jetties instead. Those guys were dead set on slaying a monster.

I’ve slowed down since those days—stopped spearing big fish back in the late ’70s after being yanked around by giant goliath groupers and ling in fights where I might’ve drowned. Texas’ most legendary “dragon slayer” was a Galveston jetty fisherman named Gus Pangarakis, who caught the state-record goliath grouper and a sawfish for the ages. How he got those creatures ashore remains a mystery—likely with help from stunned onlookers. His sawfish measured 14.5 feet and weighed 736 pounds. That record will never be broken. Sawfish in Texas are functionally extinct after decades of getting tangled in shrimp and gill nets. An older friend in Port Arthur once told me the last sawfish he ever saw was in 1962.

Anyway—here are a few examples of fish we had no business dealing with:

> The Giant Ling Off Port Arthur

Sitting on an oil rig 30 miles off Port Arthur, we watched half a dozen ling cruise by. Nothing unusual—except the leader of the group. A monster female, six feet long and easily over 100 pounds. Maybe even a state record. We were used to wrestling 30–50 pounders back then, but none of us cast at that ponderous beast. It was one of those, “You can count me out” moments. We saw her only once, but she made a lasting impression.

> The Hammerhead Longer Than My Jonboat

Launching at the old Fish Cut between Aransas and Packery Channel, we fought shallow conditions but made it out. Clear June morning, Gulf slick-calm, guys wading armpit-deep throwing trout lures. We spotted a small trout floating belly-up. Suddenly, a swirl—then a massive fin. The fin drooped at the tip, unlike an orca. Maybe a manta ray, I thought. But the shape drifted toward us like a submarine.

It was a great hammerhead longer than my 14-foot jonboat. Its hammer was four feet across. It passed directly beneath us. We sat absolutely still. Beer-can-thin aluminum was all that separated us from that shark. Nobody joked about tossing it a gold spoon.

> Swimming With a Whale Shark… or Not

We’d heard a whale shark was circling Rig 669 south of Port O’Connor, so we loaded the kids and went to swim with it. Clear blue water, tied off, snorkeled around—nothing. Heading back toward shore, I noticed a line of green water. A fin broke the surface, then another 25 feet behind it.

As we got close, the awful truth hit: they belonged to the same shark. We were about to run right between dorsal and tail. I slammed the throttle into neutral, but it was too late. We rode across the shark’s back; the engine’s lower unit bounced up and down. The tail thrashed like a submarine going to full power. It slid beneath the surface in seconds.

We stared at each other, engine idling. No one felt like swimming with a now-agitated whale shark in murky green water. We headed straight to Pass Cavallo.

> The Tarpon That Would Have Killed Us

My friend Shannon Tompkins from the Houston Chronicle visited POC. My fiberglass boat was in limbo, so we took my jonboat. I cast-netted live bait—one was a croaker almost a pound in size. We reached Pass Cavallo with a ripping outgoing tide. Shannon lobbed out the croaker on his new Shimano TLD-20 with fresh 50-pound line.

Minutes later, the rod doubled over. Thirty feet away, a titanic tarpon—bigger than anything we’d ever seen—exploded out of the water higher than our heads. Twisting, writhing, terrifying. If it landed in that jonboat, we were dead. At least one person has died that way. By some miracle, the line snapped while the fish was mid-air. We sat shaking. We had no business with that fish.

> The Barracuda From a Nightmare

Off Port O’Connor in 2019, something mauled my 18–20-pound kingfish. Expecting a shark, I pulled it up slowly. What appeared was a barracuda the length of a sofa, easily two feet longer than the Texas record. It stared at us from five feet away, chewing on my kingfish like a dog working a bone.

We had only trout tackle aboard Marilyn’s borrowed boat. Sure, there was an Ambassador 7000 with a short wire leader, but then what? Try to gaff it, and we’d be lucky to pull back a nub. Barracudas can leap incredible distances and have injured boaters before. That monster could have jumped in and chewed on us.

We let it have the king. Parted on friendly terms.

Another state record? Maybe. But we passed.