with all this talk of gargantuan GTs, I remain firmly of the view that any GT over 30kgs is a big fish and an excellent capture.
The fact that there have been a more visible proliferation of captures of massive fish in the past year doesn't change that. It is also a mistake to think that massive fish weren't capture before. Fish larger than 50kgs have been regular captures in the past, particularly in locations like Tokara and New Caledonia, not to mention the odd monster caught among the masses of mid-sized fish in the Coral Sea.
There is no doubt that the concentration of monsters appearing in the middle east are a relatively new phenomenon but as I have written in the recent past, there are massive fish everywhere. The difficult is in finding and targeting them.
A few years back, a group to Marion Reef saw some unbelievable monster GT activity including fish turning on their sides to get from various deep holes into another. They hooked heaps and got absolutely destroyed. The only person who ever landed a fish out of that area was Konishi San who got lucky when his fish ran out of the hole into the open water. That capture is one of the most well-know GT photos today. There used to be schools of huge fish caught jigging off the Burma Banks and in other surrounding areas but these got destroyed by idiots who kept every single fish they caught.
Unfortunately, the seems to be a perception that a 50kg capture is the mark of a great GT angler to the point now where we have seen fish that are more like 40kg fish being masqueraded as 50kg fish. It isn't. Some pretty mediocre anglers have fish this size but more to the point, some really excellent anglers haven't had the luck to land a fish of that size. If you want to establish how meritorious a capture is, it is not just the size, you need to take into account the terrain the fish was extracted from. Damon Olsen landed a fish around 30kgs at Shoalwater a few years back from terrain where I still can't believe he landed the fish. the fish went like hell too which made it an incredible capture.
It is getting to the absurd though when we are taking away from what are simply great captures by debating what a fish actually weighs and how misleading a photo is. Alex's fish is a wonderful capture any way you look at it and while a suggestion that this is the world's biggest GT is a little absurd, it's a wonderful capture and I hope I can get one like that this year on one of my trip.
This is why I am no longer willing to post estimates of weights of fish in photos. Let's just appreciate a great capture for what it is.
