'Am I Really Seeing This?' 1,260-Pound Marlin Caught Off MA Coast

FALMOUTH, MA — A three-hour battle with what a charter fishing boat captain initially thought was a massive shark ended with the crew returning to shore with a 1,260-pound marlin in tow.

Capt. Damon Sacco and his client, Plymouth retiree Walter Chapman, on Wednesday landed what is believed to be the largest Atlantic blue marlin ever caught off the U.S. East Coast. They weighed the over 11-foot fish in Falmouth, where it came in just 142 pounds shy of the world record, set off Brazil in 1992, according to records kept by the International Game Fish Association.

Sacco recounted the catch in a post on his Instagram account.

“… I saw a fin … a huge dorsal. Am I really seeing this? Four feet high but pointed,” he wrote.

“… The fish blasted high from the ocean fifty feet behind us. Her girth was astounding. The sound when she landed — a crashing thud, like the humpbacks make. She jumped 3 times. Then took off beneath the surface while line sliced and ripped.”

Sacco's charter boat, Castafari, was fishing in Atlantis Canyon, an underwater canyon on the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles off Cape Cod. The fish left a couple of holes in the boat's transom with its bill that Sacco said he considers “war marks.”

The fish’s head was on its way to the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab to determine its age, said Walt Golet, director of the lab and an associate professor at the university's marine sciences school, who speculated that the fish could be in the range of 25 to 30 years. The water is too cold for such a large fish most of the year in the Northeast, making the window to catch one very narrow.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.