13-year-old Alonso Ordaz was fishing on a lake in Elephant Butte, New Mexico when he reeled in what was almost a state record-breaking fish.
Alonso was with his father when he hooked onto the river monster and pulled it out of the lake. They weighed it right there on the boat using a scale they had brought with them and it weighed 55 pounds, which would have been the biggest caught in the state’s recorded history for a blue catfish.
“Wow! Fishing is great at the Butte!” Representative Rebecca Dow wrote on Facebook. “Alonso Ordaz, age 13, caught and released a 55-pound blue catfish using cut bait shad on a Santee Cooper Rig with a Muddy River Catfishing Demon Dragon.”
The current state record for a blue catfish is 54.25 pounds and Alonso would have potentially beaten that if their catch was weighed with official scales. However, they decided to release it back into the lake to keep it alive making the fish ineligible for the state record.
“The kid shouldn’t sweat it. Memorable accomplishments in life don’t depend on ‘official’ records, and even if it was slightly less than the record which it may not have been, it’s still a catch he’ll remember for life and something very few fishermen will ever come close to matching,” a FOX News commentater said.
Experts say this happens all the time – someone catches a monster fish and it doesn’t get officially weighed. Just recently a father and son from Virginia caught a 1000-pound tuna but didn’t get it officially weighed. The current record holder for the tuna is 877 pounds caught in 2017.