Congrats to Jeffrey Reinhardt on this amazing catch! The roosterfish was caught on a 6-inch pink/yellow Yo-Zuri Surface Cruiser off Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and weighed in at 106 lbs. It is a potential 50-lb. line class world record.
Here is what Jeffrey had to say about it…
“I have been visiting Zihuatanejo for six years to take advantage of this amazing roosterfish fishery. All of our fishing is with light spinning tackle & surface poppers…as you can imagine, watching a 100+ pound fish in hot pursuit of a surface popper in 5 – 10 feet of water, with its comb-like dorsal fin breaking through the water will get your heart racing! In total, my father and I caught close to 30 roosterfish in 3 days of fishing ; this is a typical trip.
I caught this fish the first morning of the trip, on my third cast. It rolled on the surface, inhaled my popper, and immediately headed for Cabo! I had to fight the fish while balancing on the roof of the panga, because he kept running off in different directions. It nearly emptied my spool of 300+ yards of braided line several times, as I could see the spool through the remaining line. After many runs and close to an hour I landed the fish. It was too exhaused to release; unfortunately we were fishing in a panga (i.e. no fish box, ice, etc.) and the fish sat in the tropical sun for 8 hours before weighing. It lost a lot of water weight, and probably would’ve been very close to the existing all-tackle world record. I have submitted it as a line-class record for the 50 lb. category.”
