London Rosiere started the autumn fishing season off in a big way when on Sept. 24, while working as a mate aboard a Paradise Outfitters boat, she hooked a massive 179-pound bigeye tuna while fishing offshore of Venice, according to Louisiana Sportsman. After hooking the fish, she handed the rod to customers on the boat.
Rosiere was on a trip with Capt. Andrew Bateman. Fishing for tuna had been slow in recent days, as a cold front had hit the area hard and only small tuna were being taken.
“A few of the other boats had only caught some little peanut yellowfins,” Rosiere reported to Louisiana Sportsman. “We got the hit on the first bait I sent out.”
The bait she used was a standard one for tuna, a hornbelly (Atlantic Bumper) rigged to a 5/0 circle hook. Using a Penn 30-wide loaded with 60-pound braided line with a top-shot of 200 feet of 60-pound monofilament line, the customers were able to fight the fish in short order.
“It kind of got tired or died, because it started to get easier to bring it in after about a half hour,” she says. “Right when I went to go gaff it, we thought it was a bigeye.”
Rosiere has seen and caught bigeye tuna previously off Louisiana, but they are an unusual catch from the Gulf of Mexico.
“They are so rare,” she said to Louisiana Sportsman. “They are fatter. They have shorter fins. The bigger eye and they just look different (than yellowfins).”
Only four other bigeye tuna are listed in the Louisiana record book. None are noted in IGFA as having been caught from the Gulf of Mexico.
Rosiere’s Louisiana bigeye tuna she hooked, fought and reeled in by Roger Miller who was a member of the crew, will rank as a tie for the third biggest fish of the species caught in state waters. The other 179-pounder was taken in 2012 by angler Dominique Chagnon.
Louisiana’s record bigeye tuna weighed 213 pounds, caught in 2018 by angler Brian Neil.
The IGFA all-tackle bigeye tuna was a gigantic 392-pound, 6-ouncer, caught in 1996 by Dieter Vogel at Puerto Rico de Gran Canaria, a Spanish island off the northwest coast of Africa.
