Fish: blackfin tuna/albacore
Weight: 57.8 pounds
Where: East End, Grand Cayman
Bait: fresh sprats
Line: 80 pound
At the rod: Robert Whorms
Boat: Party Heat, under 26 feet
Captain: Roger Wood
Mate: Albert McLean
It’s not every day an angler can say he would have had a record catch if the fish had not been cut.
Robert Whorms could have made history with his 57.8lb albacore or blackfin tuna (no one is quite sure which it is).
However the Savannah native cleaned out the inside of the fish prior to it being weighed in the name of preservation. The electrical engineer was on the Party Heat boat with captain Roger Wood and first mate Albert McLean when the fish was nabbed in East End. However Robert made the decision to stuff the fish with ice on the journey to George Town’s Barcadere Marina to keep it intact.
“I was absolutely gutted that it could have been a record,” Robert says. “I sent pictures of it to Rob Jones and Mark Bothwell and when they told me (towards the end) it could be a record everyone on the boat was excited. However the bag was too large (for the fish) so we had to gut it to preserve it by filling it with ice.
We weren’t thinking about the record then.
“To be honest I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know until afterwards that I shouldn’t have gutted it. I certainly learned something there.”
For the record the Cayman Islands Angling Club, Cayman’s national fishing body, has no official record for an albacore or blackfin tuna catch. Robert’s mark would have been a new benchmark for either species.