Thirty hours into a late April fishing trip far offshore in the Gulf, David Esslinger was hot, tired and frustrated. He and five friends had headed out of Galveston, Texas, at dawn the previous morning in hopes of connecting with a blue marlin. Action hadn’t just been slow. It had been non-existent.
“We had fished a day and a half without a bite,” said Esslinger, a 45-year-old offshore veteran who lives in Houston. But then, while fishing around a floating rig 160 miles offshore, they spotted some action. A good-size yellowfin tuna blasted the surface and went airborne.
“It must have gone 25 feet in the air,” Esslinger said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But it wasn’t feeding. It was trying to escape something.” And not too much later, that something — or one of its kin — ate one of the team’s baits.
“Our short rod went down and went down hard,” said Esslinger, who owns a construction and development business. “I normally give a six- to eight-second feed count on a blue marlin, but I didn’t have to on this one.”
More than five hours later, the men had their answer as they brought a giant bluefin tuna alongside their boat, a 46-foot-long Invincible catamaran captained by Carson Deer. Later that day the fish hit 884 pounds on a certified scale, eclipsing the current Texas state record of 876 pounds.
MORE: The Inside Story Behind a Different Giant Texas Bluefin Tuna
A Boat Crew Ready for the Fight
“I had the right crew with tons of experience,” said Deer. A 31-year-old from Houston, Deer grew up fishing the inshore waters around Galveston.
“My brother and I would get in our little old johnboat and just disappear,” said Deer, who works in the family’s industrial real estate business. As he got older, Deer’s interest moved to offshore fishing. “I went on some offshore trips and got seasick,” he said, laughing. “Eventually I beat the seasick out of me.”
For the past seven years Deer has made fishing far offshore his priority. He and friends mostly target marlin, tuna, swordfish and wahoo. Rather than a “we’ll take what hits” approach, they focus on single species.
MORE: Monster Bluefin Tuna from a Skiff
“You really need to fish separate ways for each species,” Deer said before admitting that’s not exactly how things worked out on the trip that started April 9. “We were actually marlin fishing when we hooked the bluefin tuna.”
With 20 years of marlin experience, Esslinger was a good fit for the trip. Also aboard were veteran offshore anglers TC Swetman, Brad Hildebrandt, Jeff Young and Colby Denbow.
How the Bluefin Tuna Fight Unfolded
Deer laughed when recalling the condition of the boat — the Catillac — as they headed out.
“We were loaded down,” he said. “We looked like we could have been out there for a week-and-a-half.” It didn’t take too long for the group to get past the shelf on the quad 400-powered cat and soon the group started fishing. As the hours past, anticipation soon met reality.
“The first part of the trip was a grind,” Deer said. Things started turning around the next morning when they were quickly able to make bait, loading six 5- to 10-pound blackfin tuna in their tuna tubes and setting two more out on free lines, one about 50 yards behind the boat and the other about 70 yards back.
They were slowly bump-trolling when the line on the right rigger popped. Esslinger, who started fishing with Deer just this year, was closest to the rod and grabbed it. But after a short run the fish dropped the bait without getting hooked.
Another bite followed and this time there was no doubt. “It just crushed it,” Esslinger said.
Esslinger was using a Shimano Tiagra 130A reel spooled with a top shot of 130-pound test Amilan line, a 180-pound fluorocarbon leader and a 12/0 circle hook. On the first run the fish took out about 1,400 yards of line. The fish eventually came to the surface and the crew got a quick look. It was big and dark, but they couldn’t confirm if it was a blue marlin or a giant bluefin.
The Bluefin Tuna Endgame
“Carson did a great job of keeping the boat in position,” Esslinger said. About three hours into the fight, with the fish again deep below the boat, Esslinger felt something change. Rather than the fish turning in circles, it became a dead weight.
“I looked back at TC, who is one of my best friends, and said, ‘I think she’s dead,’” Esslinger said. It took another two hours of work, pulling the fish up inch by inch with the drag eventually cranked to 52 pounds, to get the tuna boat side and secured.
“I think I almost cried,” Deer said. “We were hugging and high-fiving.” After pulling the giant tuna into the cockpit, the crew faced another challenge. How to keep it cool for the ride home.
“One of the guys had brought a kill bag,” Deer said. “It wasn’t big enough so we had to cut it up and lay it on top of the fish and cover it with ice.”
During the ride back — “the best boat ride you could imagine,” according to Deer — the men speculated about the tuna’s weight. “The general consensus was 650 pounds,” Deer said. That consensus was, obviously, wrong. After the official weight, the work was not done.
“We had a bunch of help cleaning the fish,” Esslinger said. “I called friends and was like, ‘Bring coolers!’”
A Bluefin Tuna with A Tag
In a fun twist, the crew aboard Catillac had found that the giant tuna had been tagged not once, but twice.
Molly Lutcavage, at the Large Pelagics Research Center, confirmed to Esslinger that it was most recently caught on Oct. 11, 2024, off Liverpool, Nova Scotia, by Capt. Joel Jadquard, Capt. Eric Jacquard and Capt. Anthony Mendillo, longtime tagging partners with the center. They estimated the fish’s weight at 800 pounds at the time. At press time, Lutcavage was tracking down information about the other tag.
Esslinger said he is in the process of submitting the necessary state record application. While he is the official angler, he deferred credit. “No one guy,” he said, “catches a fish this big.”
