Wicked Tuna! Massachusetts teens catch 455 pounder: ‘My first time going out there’
Two South Shore teenagers caught the fish of a lifetime this week, as they hooked a massive 455-pound tuna off the coast.
For one of the Scituate 15-year-olds, it was his first-ever time out on the seas fishing for tuna.
Aidan McCormack and Johnny Donahue caught the 8-foot tuna about 30 miles off the Scituate coast in the bay on Tuesday.
“It was my first time going out there to catch tuna, so it was pretty astonishing,” Donahue told the Herald a day after harpooning the giant. “Catching a jumbo, it’s the luckiest thing you can get.”
“I’m one for one,” he added after his debut tuna fishing expedition.
The rising high school sophomores were on a 22-foot boat catching bluefish off of Race Point Beach in Provincetown early Tuesday morning. They then decided to go into the bay off the Cape and drift with the bluefish.
Only about 30 minutes later, the buddies had hooked the beast.
Tunas usually will put up a fight for several hours, but for the teens, it was only about a 20-minute battle with the behemoth.
“It’s crazy how we got it up so fast. It was really good teamwork,” McCormack said, noting that Donahue harpooned the tuna, “landing a good shot.”
“It was pretty exhilarating seeing something like that out there,” added McCormack, who started tuna fishing last August and “got hooked.”
They needed help getting the huge fish on the boat, so they drove over to another boat, which had a pulley system to get it up and over.
The teenagers brought the tuna back to Scituate Harbor, where they sold the “nice and fatty” 455-pounder, McCormack said. They won’t know the price for a few weeks, as it heads to Japan to get analyzed.
“They survey the meat and figure out the price and tell the captain,” McCormack said. “A price can range from $5 to $20 a pound, but you never know. It was very fatty.”
At the $20-a-pound rate, the tuna would be worth more than $9,000.
Most of the money from the tuna will go to the captain, McCormack said, but he’ll “throw you some money.”
The Scituate teen said he had a chance for a repeat performance a day later, as he lost a tuna early Wednesday morning in the same part of the bay. He estimated this lost tuna was more than 800 pounds.
“Tuna fishing is slow,” McCormack said. “You don’t expect a fish every day, so what we did (catching the 455-pounder) was very cool.”