POIPU, Hawaii (KHON2) — A teenager on Kauai might have just nabbed the fish of a lifetime on Wednesday off Poipu.
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Taelin Sugimura has been spearfishing since he was a boy, but the 18-year old never expected to catch an ulua that weighs more than 130 pounds.
It certainly looks huge in the pictures that were taken on land, but Sugimura said the 134-pound ulua looked even bigger when he spotted it in the water.
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“Everything just went like, everything went slow motion and I watched it just swim in front of me and then it started to swim away and then I called it back to me by grunting,” he said.
Sugimura shot the ulua in the head with his speargun, but it was not a kill shot and the fish took off — Sugimura only weighs 120 pounds and the oceanic beast started to drag him to the depths.
“When my friend grabbed my heel when I was flying past him, it kind of slowed it down a little bit,” he said.
The ulua then turned around and swam back toward Sugimura, which gave him and his two fellow divers enough time to deliver the final blow.
“He got the second shot in and we started screaming,” said Sugimura’s friend, Bing Pellin. “We had to get all three of our spear guns in that thing before it got knocked. We all hit headshots but we couldn’t find the brain until the last shot, thankfully got it.”
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A boater thankfully helped the fisherman bring their haul to shore, experts said ulua this size are seldom seen.
“It’s always been rare to catch what’s basically called a 100-pounder. So any fish above 100 pounds. And that’s really the goal of a lot of the ulua fishermen is sometime in their life to be able to join that club,” said UH Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology associate research professor Erik Franklin. “Congratulations to that guy. That’s an amazing catch. That’s a that’s a lifelong dream right there.”
Sugimura — a third generation diver himself — and his buddies said it will be a fishing tale that they tell for years to come and this one is true.
“I’m trying to explain how beautiful this fish looked when it was swimming up to us. It would look like it had so much aura to it and it was just just swimming with such elegance,” Pellin said.
“I’m really happy about that and now I don’t need to look for one again,” Sugimura said, “I’m going to go and get it Gyotaku’d, which is like the old Japanese way of looking at fish before social media, I guess, and you just paint the fish and put it on top of rice paper.”
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The world and State record for the larges ulua officially weighed was 191 pounds — that beast was caught between Maui and Lanai in 1980.
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