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Myerson was following his regular routine when he drifted his boat over a submerged boulder near Outer Southwest Reef off the coast of Westbrook, Connecticut, around 8 p.m. on August 4, trailing a live eel a few feet off the bottom.
“There’s often big fish behind the boulder, and I always hit it on my way out to Six Mile Reef to fish for the night,” Myerson says. The first drift yielded a hard strike, but no fish. On the second drift, he set the hook against another hard strike and watched as a striper started to pull his boat against the tide before settling heavily on the bottom.
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“I couldn’t budge him at first,” says Myerson, who uses a heavy duty 6-½ foot St. Croix tuna rod and a Quantum Cabo reel spooled with 50-lb. Berkley Gorilla Braid to handle big stripers. “Then he took off on a real good run, and I had to tighten the drag because he was burning line fast. He stripped about 60 yards of line against the current.”
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“I noticed the line rising, and I told my buddy, ‘Watch this, the fish is going to break the surface.’ He porpoised out of the water and I got my first look at him. Oh, man, I knew I had something special then. It’s only the big stripers that will jump like that. I was just hoping the hook was stuck good.”
The fight only lasted 20 minutes, but “seemed like eternity,” Myerson says. “He kinda lost some steam and started coming back toward the boat and I was able to gain a lot of line. Then the net got stuck on the boat’s swimming platform and wouldn’t come off. The fish was ready to be netted and we were in a little bit of a panic mode for a minute. We finally freed the net and got the fish in the boat.”
Another look revealed how close someone else had come to setting the new world record: the striper had a hook and about 6 ft. of leader in its mouth, evidence of a recent hookup that had broken off.
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Lots of folks would have headed straight for the nearest scale: Myerson headed to Six Mile Reef to fish out the tide. Using his standard night bait of live eels (“I use the giant eels nobody else uses; if something’s gonna grab it, I know it’s big”) for the next 2 ½ hours he pulled a dozen more stripers out of the sea, all the time running back to the fish hold to peer at his prize catch. “I kept saying, ‘Is that fish really that big? Yep, it is.’”
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With no certified scale available at that hour, Myerson didn’t officially weigh his catch until 8:30 the next morning, nearly 12 hours after he caught it. The 54-inch striper spent the night packed in ice in a cooler. The crowd gathered at the dock soon morphed into a big party, and Myerson re
ports, “This morning I was home in bed smelling like fish and with a major headache.”
And with a pending world record in his back pocket.
Another big crowd was on hand when Myerson showed up to weigh the fish at Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle in Westbrook. Many—including Myerson himself—were shocked when the scale topped 80 pounds.
Owner Jack Katzenbach says there’s one thing that’s no surprise: “If anyone was going to catch a world record, it was going to be Myerson,” he says. “He’s a regular in here and in the last year alone he’s had three fish over 60 pounds.”
One, a 68.75-lb. striper caught this time last year on the same reef, was until now the biggest striper Katzenbach had ever seen.
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The madhouse scene of flashing cameras and shouted questions was all too much for Myerson. “I’m a private person, and I wasn’t exactly feeling my best this morning,” he says. “I told Jack, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m out of here,’ and I left.”
Rumors started buzzing around the Internet that Myerson had a panic attack and drove himself to the hospital. “That’s not true at all. I don’t know where the hell that came from. It just proves how asinine some people can be when a big fish is involved. It’s crazy.”
Measuring the length of the fish.
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There’s another rumor he can put to rest: Reports that Myerson won’t enter the fish as a world record? Bunk, he says.
“I’d be an *** if I didn’t, wouldn’t I?” Yet at the same time, he says, “I don’t care about the world record. I broke my all-time record, and that’s what really matters to me.”
Lots of people say that when they set a world record. But Myerson seems to genuinely mean it.
“I just like to fish. I’ve been doing it most of my life,” he says. “I’ve fly-fished all over the world. I have a trout stream in my front yard, and I bought my house for that reason. I have trout that I feed pellets every morning while I’m having my coffee.”
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