Texan Bags 235 Pound Alligator Gar With Spear
It’s quite a coincidence that during the first summer to showcase a blockbuster movie featuring a monstrous shark in quite some time, an actual aquatic monster was bagged for what could turn out to be a world record.
While this massive alligator gar may not have been able to tangle with “The Meg,” it’s still a very impressive catch.
Texan Darren Carr recently bagged a potential world record alligator gar for a real life summer blockbuster in Lake Amistad, according to the Del Rio News Herald.
Texan Bags Alligator Gar That Could Be New World Record https://t.co/Xc0XPtzWV2 pic.twitter.com/qtDTPLW2ks
— Dual Frontier (@DualFrontier) August 17, 2018
The mammoth gar was nearly 8 feet long and well over 200 pounds.
Gar are obviously big fish, but rarely grow to the size of the one caught by Carr. Typically, they will be the size of the ones tagged and researched by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Our @TPWDFish crews are surveying #Texas waters for alligator gar, like this one caught, tagged and released in the Brazos River near Lake Jackson.
More on Texas #gar at https://t.co/cAEEHP15ms pic.twitter.com/0MbzegQZjj
— TX Parks & Wildlife (@TPWDnews) August 2, 2018
Carr, a registered captain who guides commercially on Lake Amistad, says that a tip from a fishing buddy led him to his wild discovery.
“A bass fishing buddy of mine, Brendan Kimmel, called me and said, ‘Hey man, I saw a ton of gar in this cove. You might want to go check it out.’ So (fishing partner D.W. Senney) and (wife) Nicki and I went up there the night before and looked around, and D-Dub actually shot one that was 191 pounds with a bow and arrow,” Carr said.
191 pounds is certainly impressive. But Carr clearly wasn’t about to let his fishing partner hog all the glory.
From his descriptions, Carr’s quest for glory sounded like something straight out of any lake-based horror story.
“We anchored the boat and put some lines out trying to fish for them, and I said I’m going to go swim that cove with my spear gun. The water in there was terribly murky,” Carr described, revealing that the original plan was to bag a gar with a rod and reel.
“I couldn’t see more than probably four or five feet. I had a carp come slinging up into my legs, scaring the you-know-what out of me, and then I came face-to-face with her, maybe two or three feet away,” Carr said.
If that wasn’t scary enough, the gar didn’t flee or anything. If anything, it seemed to take a defensive posture. That, apparently, was the gar’s mistake.
“Instead of blasting out of there, she just sunk down to the bottom, which allowed me to get a shot on her,” said Carr. That shot was a direct hit onto the gar’s back.
“She went blasting out of that cove toward the main channel of the lake. I just held onto the line, and she dragged me around for a while. We got out into deeper water, and she actually circled around me several times, came back toward me. The scary part was that I had line all around me and I didn’t want to get wrapped up in that,” Carr said.
After winning the struggle, the immediate measurements tagged Carr’s alligator gar as being 95 inches, which is just a shade under 8 feet, and 235 pounds.
The fish has to be officially entered and measured through the proper authorities, but if it stands, it’ll be a new world record for largest alligator gar captured with a spear.
The IGFA record for an all-tackle alligator gar is a whopping 279 pounds.
For now, Carr has wrestled away the Lake Amistad record from his friend, who caught a 221 pound alligator gar with a bow and arrow.
“I’m exuberant. It’s a wild deal, I promise you, one-on-one with a fish like that. She swims a lot better than me,” Carr said.
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