Not even a mother could love that face, but angler Brandon Hogue, of Lakeshore, Mississippi, plans to have it mounted if he can find a taxidermist who will do it. At 30 pounds, 2.24 ounces, it is the Mississippi state record conger eel.
“It’s an ugly fish. Lord have mercy, after it sat in that ice chest, it definitely looked like it had a bad Botox job,” said Hogue. “That fish was so ugly, I started looking good in those photos.”
Hogue caught it in July while deep dropping a rig with friends and his two younger brothers, Ashton and Bradley, about 100 miles out in the Gulf. It was a few days after Hogue’s 29th birthday, and he wanted to catch a birthday tuna.
Night Fishing in the Gulf
The plan for their overnight trip was to run Capt. Mac Murphree’s 30-foot Grady-White to blue water in search of tuna, but rough seas forced a change of plans. They were targeting barrel fish and grouper on an oil rig in about 1,000 feet of water. Hogue said the only fish they caught on the rigs were eels and surmised there must have been some type of aggregation.
Handlining the State Record Conger Eel
Sometime between midnight and dawn, the big conger picked up a chunk of cut bait. Hogue was armed with a swordfish rod and a Penn International 70 with 80-pound-test braid. He had plenty of firepower—until a knot in the line jammed in the rod guide when the fish was only 100 feet off the bottom.
“I said, ‘give me some gloves’ and started handlining it in from 900 feet.” Hogue said. “It’s a weird tug. There’s no run to it. It’s just that every time it got stuck, I’d give it a good jerk, because all they really do is wriggle around.”
A conger eel is not a very strong swimmer, Hogue said. Its best defense was to wrap itself around rig beams. Hogue had to yank it off the rig several times.
“They’ll hold onto something, and you’ve just got to pull those suckers off,” he said. “Let me tell you, you’ve got to do like five wraps around your hand and freaking pull.”
When Hogue finally got the eel to the surface, it was still alive and wriggling.
“I looked around for somebody to be there with the gaff, and nobody was there. So I turned around, grabbed the gaff, and I got it in the boat,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what, with the teeth on those things, man, you want to get back from them. It would not be good for that thing to latch a hold of you.”
Eels are also very slimy.
“We had caught a few of those things already, and with 900 feet of braid on the deck and all that slime, even my Grundens had a hard time keeping me upright,” Hogue said. “And Grundens are the best deck boots out there, in my opinion.”
Mississippi State Record Conger Eel
So… Hogue’s birthday tuna—he did catch a small one on the trip—ended up being outshined by what could be Mississippi’s ugliest state record fish. The IGFA all-tackle world record weighed 133 pounds, 4 ounces. It was caught off the coast of England in 1995.
Along with being a fisherman and a fabricator, Hogue is a musician. If you like country music, look up Brandon Michael Hogue and the Brandon Hogue Band on social media.
