Sugar Land man catches behemoth 300-pound alligator gar in Houston bayou
Ryan Nickerson, Staff writer
May 11, 2022Updated: May 11, 2022 3:07 p.m.
I watched the video this guy made of him fishing and catching this monster. He had to rope it to get it out on the bank. After he'd beached it, measured it, {8 feet +}, he talked some more about it, then RELEASED it back into the bayou. Pretty impressive. This should be on one of the fishing shows - think its called River Monsters (?).
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 1of5YouTuber and wildlife conservationist Payton Moore caught an alligator gar that was over 8 feet long in one of Houston's waterways.
Courtesy/ Payton Moore
Payton Moore dreams of giant fish.
The Sugar Land resident set sail down a Houston bayou Thursday, determined to catch one of the largest alligator gars Texas has potentially ever seen.
Unofficially, he did just that, angling a humongous alligator gar more than 8 feet long and weighing upwards of 300 pounds.
Moore, 32, declined to disclose the name of the bayou for the gargantuan fish's protection, but the full-time YouTuber captured the catch on video and posted it to his channel.
The catchWhen Moore first placed his reel, he thought he may have snagged a tree branch. He couldn't move the other end of his line.
The moment the fish started moving, Moore could tell he'd found a giant. "It felt like somebody's car had just started up and was rolling out of the driveway, and I'm hanging on to the end of it,"
Since the fish was too powerful to reel in while at full strength, he first had to exhaust it. He strategically made it swim in circles and constantly changed its direction to confuse it.
"They're big, they're strong, they're heavy, and they give you everything they got, right away," Moore said of alligator gars.
When the opportunity presented itself, Moore used a lasso to wrangle the gar and secure it around its pectoral fins.
Moore says his catch measured in at a whopping length of 8 feet 2 inches. He added that it was approximately 48 inches in girth, putting it comfortably over 300 pounds.
The current state record for alligator gar is 302 pounds, set in 1953.
After capturing video of the catch, Moore promptly released it back into the bayou, saying he didn't want to risk the animal dying while waiting to be weighed on a state-certified scale.
"Sometimes, by the time you might have somebody come out and measure it or if you manage to bring that fish somewhere else, large fish can stress and the process could potentially kill the fish that way," said Dr. Solomon David, an aquatic ecologist at Nicholls State University and GarLab's principal investigator. "My hat's off to Payton for releasing the fish."
Moore and David estimate the gar could've been between 50 to 100 years old. "The fish literally could have been swimming around in Texas waters when Truman was president," Moore said.
The world record for the largest alligator gar ever caught is 8 feet 5 inches and 327 pounds. Researchers estimate that fish was 95 years old.
"It's very likely there are alligator gar out there that are over 100 years old," David said. "You're looking at well over half a century for a lot of these large alligator gar."
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/moco/news/article/alligator-gar-bayou-catch-17164873.php |
