Image: Griffin Buckwalter
Via bangordailynews.com. Wyatt Morse, 17, of Auburn Maine, named his boat "Fat 2na." Little did he know how appropriate that would be when he headed out for a day of fishing with his buddies off the Maine coast.
On July 1st, Wyatt and his friends Martin Scanlan, 16, of Aspen, Colorado, and Griffin Buckwalter, 16, of Scarborough, Maine, hooked a big one, a really big one! Over the next seven hours, a monstrous 700 pound bluefin tuna, 109 inches long ,hauled the teens more than 10 miles in the 24-foot lobster boat as they attempted to tire it out and land it.
According to the Bangor Daily News, " The three friends had motored about 30 miles offshore and had anchored when the tuna took the bait at about 9:45 a.m. Buckwalter, who was on his first tuna-fishing trip, had tagged along to film the action he hoped they’d have. ' “I was groundfishing [for haddock] in 190 feet, 200 feet of water. Just for fun, catch and release,” Buckwalter said.
Then the tuna hit, and chaos ensued.
Scanlan pointed at a rod that had bent toward the sea, and Buckwalter hopped up and tended it. Then they started yelling for Morse, who had just lay down for a quick nap, to come help.
“It feels like everything went crazy. I was fighting a fish, Wyatt was actually sleeping, and we started screaming, yelling and flipping out,” Buckwalter said.
It's a great fish story worthy of a Hemingway novel. Read the details here at BangorDailyNews.com.
And check out the video and photos of this epic battle!