A fisherman from Cagnes-sur-Mer may have landed one of the biggest amberjack ever caught off the Riviera coast, near Monaco, but thanks to an unfortunate quirk of fishing gear, he’ll never actually know the fish’s true weight.
According to Nice-Matin, which conducted the original interview with the angler, Romain Caron’s professional scale is capped at 50 kilograms, and his amberjack maxed it out entirely, on both a standard scale and the capped professional one. Without a certified weighing, the catch can’t be officially homologated, ruling out any formal record claim regardless of how large the fish actually was.
For comparison, the French Federation of Sea Anglers lists a 45-kilogram amberjack caught off Nice back in September 2007 as one of its benchmark catches. Caron’s fish would appear to be at least five kilograms heavier, but without matching certification, the two simply can’t be placed side by side.
The catch capped off a trip that began with almost nothing going right. Caron had set out that morning with friends Tristan and Guillaume in search of tuna, only to hit traffic in Monaco and arrive at the boat roughly twenty minutes late. Stepping out of his car, he then discovered the leader on one of his rods had been damaged, forcing him to retie it before the group could finally head out. As it turned out, the delay worked in his favour, putting the three men in exactly the right spot once they finally got moving.
Barely out of the harbour, the group ran into a large school of bonito feeding on the surface. Tristan and Guillaume each hooked a fish almost immediately using a jig and a popper. Caron followed suit, casting a small popper he’d originally packed for a trip to the Seychelles into a nearby bait ball of anchovies. The response was immediate: a ripple on the surface, then a violent strike that swallowed the lure whole.
What followed bore little resemblance to a typical tuna fight. The fish’s heavy, jarring headshakes eventually gave the game away, and when a huge pale shape finally surfaced beneath the boat, Tristan identified it at once as an amberjack. Guillaume jumped into the water to help haul it aboard.
The greater amberjack (Seriola dumerili) remains one of the most sought-after targets in Mediterranean sport fishing, prized as much for the fight it puts up once hooked as for the size it can reach.
Caron isn’t chasing any official recognition for the catch. As he put it to Nice-Matin, it’s likely the fish of his life, and the memory is one he’s happy to keep, certified scale or not.
Image courtesy of Romain Caron