A Warsaw whopper

It coulda been a world record.

It woulda been among the biggest groupers ever landed.

And it certainly shoulda been weighed.

Four men fishing out of Bay City Lodge the morning of June 25 landed a leviathan-size Warsaw grouper that arguably eclipsed the world record of 436 pounds, 12 ounces, set by Capt. Steve Haeusler, fishing out of Destin on Dec. 22, 1985.

Based on its length of 82" long and girth of 66 inches, and using one of several conventional formulas designed to estimate weight, the behemoth grouper might well have tipped the scales at about 446 pounds had they tried to ascertain its poundage.

"No, we didn't weigh it," said the group's leader, Billy Daniels, from Moody, Ala. "We wanted to go back out fishing."

The magnificent specimen of Epinephelus nigritus was landed about 15 miles southeast of St. George Island, off the artificial reef made from remnants of the old Apalachicola Bridge.

The four men were all aboard Daniels' 23-foot Polar Bay boat they had driven down from Birmingham on one of their twice-yearly trip to the legendary fish camp. "This is about our third year," said Daniels. "The last week of June we come down to Bay City for seven or eight days."

The men, Daniels' son-in-law Clint Haley and friend Ken Debrick, both from Paola, Kan., son Shawn Daniels, from Stanley, Kan.; and Billy Daniels had come prepared to outsmart the giant-sized groupers that bedeviled them in the past.

The men had fretted how they kept getting their lines snagged in the reef. "We kept getting hung up, do two cranks on the reel and it would stop," he said. "We got back to Bay City and they told us ‘You're not getting hung up. You're feeding the groupers."

So Daniels studied up on how these huge reef fish would watch to see the littler guys snagged on a hook, and then snack on them as they struggled against the tug.

"This year I bought a real big pole just for that," said Daniels.

The crew outfitted the 100-pound rod, custom made in Texas, with an Okuma Titus Silver 50 Wide 2-Speed Trolling Reel, and 200-lb. Momoi Diamond monofilament leader.

"It's one of the best lines you can buy," said Daniels, noting the line has a tensile strength of up to twice that of stated line tests.

On the end was a 16/0 circle hook, among the largest out there, baited with croaker caught by Haley, the crew's "gruntmaster."

The crew got to the reef about 8 a.m., and got the anchor set about 8:20 a.m. They were ready.

"The day before we hooked another fish, my son fought the fish, and it had a 20-inch grouper unharmed in its mouth," said Daniels. "You put a really good tug on it and he tries to spit it out."

First to come up that Thursday morning was "a nice cobia" and then came the big one.

Shawn Daniels then caught "a nice black snapper," weighing about 10 pounds, with a different rod.

It was time for the big one.

Daniels said it took his son only about 15 minutes to bring the Warsaw to the surface from about 80 feet of water. "When we saw that thing coming up, I thought ‘My goodness, that can't be real,'" he said.

Daniels said the crew at first prepared to release their catch, thinking it was a goliath grouper, the so-called jewfish, which is a prohibited species.

"You can't keep those," he said, recalling how he and his wife caught and released a 50-pound goliath grouper at Sikes Cut over Memorial Day weekend..

"But it's a complete different looking fish," Daniels said. "(Warsaw) has a square tail and doesn't have a banded stripe."

Once they got over their amazement, the men took another 15 minutes to figure out how to get the enormous fish into the boat.

"We all got to a corner of the back of boat, and once we got his head on to the boat, the boat kind of leaned over and we backed up and pulled him back in," said Daniels. "There was no way we can lift him, we just had to slide him."

Whatever it was that attracted the attention of the Warsaw's appetite will never be known. "The hook was in his lip but whatever was on there was gone," said Daniels. "We don't know."

With the fish crowding them on the 23-foot boat, the crew headed back to Bay City, and pulled in a little before 10:30 a.m.

"I went into the office and I said ‘We got a problem. We have a fish we can't get out of the boat,'" Daniels said.

When Bay City manager Buddy Renfro went out to see it, he was flabbergasted. "He thought I was joking with him," said Daniels.

"It had eight big old hooks in its mouth," said Renfro.

He said the men told him, before realizing it was a Warsaw, "the first thing they were fixing to let him go. They done unhooked him and they gaffed him back."

Renfro's son got a backhoe to lift the fish out of the boat, and then suspended it overhead as the men posed with their catch.

Unable to find a suitable scale, and unwilling to transport it to a second location to have it weighed, the men proceeded to clean it right on the Bay City dock.

"It took about three-and-a-half hours," said Daniels. "There was about 20 people who came over and looked at it."

The fish yielded six five-gallon buckets of filleted meat, which was then vacuum-packed. "They took about 80 pounds of meat back to Kansas City," aid Daniels. "We took the rest back to Birmingham."

A vice president of engineering for Precision Husky, a Leeds, Ala. firm that specializes in building heavy equipment, Daniels was off the next week to Vancouver, British Columbia.

He had high hopes, but a radiator leak on a track machine that grinds material for biomass, forced cancellation of Daniels' plans to fish for trout in one of glorious Canadian lakes nearby.

Meanwhile, a digital picture of his crew now graces the walls of Bay City, near the black-and-white snapshots of decades ago, when Milton Houseman, Louis Roux and other local fishermen can be seen with massive catches of their own.

"I figure that fish was about 25 years old," said Roux, adding what may be a world-record understatement:

"They're kind of rare," he said. "You don't catch them every day."

Bay City owner Jimmy Mosconis, who was out fishing the morning the fish came in, said in 35 years as the fish camp's owner "I have never seen a fish that was remotely close to that size."

Haeusler, the world record holder, said he heard rumors of a Louisiana fish that may have rivaled that state's 359-pound record, and of the Bay City catch. He said he didn't recall the dimensions of his 436-pound record breaker, but that "when it laid in the back of a pickup, it filled it up.

"I wish they had weighed it," he said. "That's a pretty good fish right there."