In Rhode Island, a fisherman has broken the tautog wrasse record since 1954
record-sized wrasse tautoga. This is reported by the Johnston Sun Rise.
The fish was pulled out of the water by a resident of the American state of New Jersey Paul Newman. Its length was 83.82 centimeters, and its weight was 9.78 kilograms. The previous Rhode Island record for catching tautog wrasse, held since 1954, belonged to an angler who caught a fish weighing 9.64 kilograms.
Connor Macleod, the captain of the boat from which Newman fished, said that in crab was used as bait. At first, the angler decided that his tackle was stuck at the bottom, but soon the line got taut: the tautoga grabbed the bait and tried to hide in the bottom stones.
Newman began to reel in the line and almost pulled the fish onto the boat, but then it disappeared back into depth. “They tugged the line back and forth four more times until the giant fish reached the surface,” Macleod wrote in On-the-Water magazine.
Tautogi whales are found off the Atlantic coast of North America. They tend to hide among rocks and other objects lying on the bottom, in which the line can become entangled. Because of this, tautogas are considered difficult to fish.
In December 2020, it was reported that a record-sized tautoga wrasse was caught off the coast of the US state of New Jersey. The fish weighed 11,567 kilograms, 85 grams more than the state record since 2015.