Minor’s Major Gaff : Novice Northridge Tuna Angler Didn’t Ante Up for Biggest Fish but Hit the Jackpot With What Likely Is a World-Record Catch

The late afternoon sun glistened off the deep, blue waters of the Pacific, and he was hungry. As the others in his group ate heartily, he finally found a snack he liked and popped it into his mouth.

And, suddenly, he was locked hard in the fight of his life.

In just a few moments, his body began to ache from the strain as the fishing line sliced back and forth through the sparkling water, the relentless tugging at the other end sending his heart rate soaring and the adrenaline surging through his powerful body.

It wasn’t until three hours later, when the sun had fallen into the sea and a great darkness had settled and his body cried out for relief from the agony and the numbing exhaustion of the battle that he finally got a look at his opponent. As the 90-foot sport fishing boat Polaris Supreme bobbed majestically on the black, rolling sea, he worked his way toward the stern, forced to fight every inch of the way against the unmerciful pull of the heavy line.

And then he looked up.

And he saw a light.

And then he saw his adversary.

It was a sight to see.

It was Richard Minor.

And the huge yellowfin tuna--a behemoth that had raised the hairs on the backs of the necks of Minor and other anglers on the boat when he had, hours earlier, rushed to within four feet of the boat and clamped his powerful jaws on the live mackerel and sent a wall of water hard against the stern--took off again, summoning the survival instinct his species had attained over millions of years and channeling that into every fiber of his heavily muscled body.

With that frightening surge, the massive fish stripped 250 yards of 130-pound test line off the reel. And nearly broke Minor’s will to fight.

“My arms and hands ached so bad that I just didn’t think it was possible to hold on any more,” said Minor, who is 5-foot-6 and weighs nearly 250 pounds. “Everything told me to give it up. And when he broke away again after being so close to the boat, when he stripped more than half the line off my reel and was out there so far again, I almost quit.”

Today, eight days after the battle of a lifetime, Minor, 50, of Northridge, is glad he didn’t give up. He is about to go into the International Game Fish Assn. record book. The monstrous yellowfin tuna is not quite as excited. It is about to go up on the wall of Minor’s den at a cost of $1,800 to Minor.

The fish, weighed Wednesday when the Polaris Supreme returned to its dock at Fisherman’s Landing in San Diego, lit up the scales at 363 pounds, nine ounces, a pending world record on 130-pound test line. The IFGA must certify the line and hook before the catch gets stamped into its book. The current record is a 357-pound, three-ounce yellowfin caught in 1987 by Curt Wiesenhutter, who also holds the all-tackle record, a 388-pound, 12-ounce giant he caught in 1977.

A 399-pound, six-ounce yellowfin was caught aboard the Polaris Supreme last December, but it is not an IFGA record because the angler, Mark Gasich, was forced to use a backup rod and reel during the wild fight.

So Minor, a retired machinist and businessman, will go into the book as having whipped the second-largest yellowfin in history on a single rod and reel. Quite an accomplishment for a relative novice to the sport of giant-tuna fishing, a guy who thought so little of his chances of catching a really big yellowfin on the 16-day trip that he didn’t bother to enter the boat’s big-fish jackpot.

“I was just overmatched by most of the guys on the boat,” he said. “These are the die-hard fishermen, the real veterans of these 16-day trips. I’d been on three- and five- and even a 10-day trip but never long enough to reach the waters way down the coast where the giant tuna live. I knew I didn’t have a chance to win the jackpot.”

Not only would Minor have taken the $350 first prize in the jackpot, he would have taken second place. A few days before he whipped the giant fish, he boated a 260-pounder. The next-largest fish on the trip weighed 199 pounds.

Until Minor hooked the record fish, the trip had produced fewer--and smaller--fish than usual. The refrigerated holding tank held some 50- and 75-pound yellowfin after several days of fishing the Revillagigedo Islands, a string of formations jutting out of the Pacific 300 miles southwest of Cabo San Lucas. But in the late afternoon last Wednesday, Polaris Supreme owner and skipper Tommy Rothery slid the boat alongside a pair of rocky spikes called Roca Partida Island, and within moments the water boiled with giant tuna.

Minor grabbed a mackerel from the bait tank, pinned it through the lips and lowered it into the blue waters. After 10 minutes, Minor began reeling the bait back in, preparing to replace it with a livelier mackerel.

He almost got it back to the boat.

“Just as the bait came up, not four feet from the stern, this thing came after it,” Minor said. “It was just huge. It rushed at it from below and when it hit the surface and grabbed it, everything just exploded. It felt like a tidal wave hit the back of the boat. It was something to see.”

The fun ended in about two seconds. And the work began. The fish initially nearly stripped all of the 500 yards of line from Minor’s 50SW Penn International reel. Thirty minutes after it had showered Minor with a blast of salty spray, the fish had taken all but a few yards of line.

“I think I had about 12 wraps of line left on the spool,” he said. “It was pretty serious.”

If things didn’t look bleak enough, it was at that moment that Rothery and others noticed that Minor’s line had missed one of the six guides on the rod and was chafing against the fiberglass. Minor was given the option of attaching another rod and reel to the first and tossing his outfit overboard, the technique often used when battling the largest yellowfin. But Minor knew that would prevent his catch from being recognized by the IFGA, and he declined.

“I wanted him on one rod and reel,” Minor said. “So at that point, I just started leaning into him and getting a little bit of line back. And a foot at a time, he started coming back in.”

Many, many feet later, Minor had the giant alongside the boat. Three excruciating hours had passed and Minor had fought off the urge to quit at least once. Now, fellow anglers and several deckhands had crowded around him. Some were tossing buckets of cold water on Minor and others were holding bottles of liquids to his lips to keep him going. And as the fish bulled its way to the stern, it wrapped the line around the boat’s propeller, the nightmare for anglers hooked to giant fish.

But Rothery poked the line free with a long gaff, and Minor was relieved. For one second.

“That’s when he took off again,” he said. “Just smoking the reel. It was incredible. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

But he endured, and the tug of war continued. Ninety minutes later, nearly 4 1/2 hours after the fish had rushed Minor’s bait and hooked itself, the giant came out of the depths again alongside the boat. This time, Rothery sent his deckhands into action with a mission: whether the fish is ready to gaff or not, stick him.

And they did. Two heavy gaff hooks went into the fish and then . . .

“Then, all hell broke loose,” Rothery said. “The fish was wild. It came real close to yanking my first two deckhands overboard. But we got a few more hooks into him and got him on the boat.”

The wild battle was, thankfully, over.

“When night came, it was eerie,” Minor said. “It was so dark. And out there, somewhere, was something stronger than me, pulling with so much force. It was an odd feeling. But the crew members stayed with me every minute, encouraging me and helping me. They never left me alone, and that meant a lot.

“Especially to a guy like me who didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”

A few days later, the Polaris Supreme dropped off Minor and some of the other anglers in Cabo San Lucas. They would fly home to Southern California. The boat, and Minor’s giant fish, would return to San Diego several days later.

Wednesday morning, Minor and his family, accompanied by a crowd of others who had heard of the massive fish, gathered at the dock. When Minor’s fish was hoisted from the boat, quickly weighed and then gently lowered to the dock, the angler’s eyes grew wide.

“It was the first time I had seen it in the daylight,” Minor said. “It just looked huge.

“It was hard to imagine I had caught such a thing.”