By Mark Taylor.
A 700-pound tuna from a skiff? Yes, two anglers made it happen.
For three days, Danthony Winslow and Lathan Price had been, as they call it, “tuna wishing.” They’d been drifting live bait for bluefin tuna off the coast of North Carolina, facing sub-freezing cold in an open 23-foot skiff in the Atlantic, which at least had been mercifully calm most of the time.
“We’d been out there three days and didn’t get a sniff,” said Winslow, a 22-year-old commercial fisherman from Morehead City, North Carolina. “And we’d frozen our butts off.” They needed to break the spell, so on the fourth day they did something a little different. “We brought along a Mr. Buddy propane heater,” Winslow said with a laugh. “In an open boat, it wasn’t much.”
Price, a 21-year-old whose primary gig is as a charter captain, agreed. “At least it knocked the chill off,” he said. The pair, friends since middle school, were huddled around the heater when something else happened that made them forget about the cold. They finally got a bite.
More than five hours later, the men finally had the fish aboard — and it was nearly half as long as the boat. The 115-inch bluefin would core out at 700 pounds — not a record, but an amazing catch from a small boat.
Price and Winslow are both from fishing families. Price is a captain with Legacy Fishing Charters out of Morehead City. His uncle Eric Price runs the Offshore Outlaw, which has been featured on “Wicked Tuna.” Most of Winslow’s commercial fishing centers on multi-day bottom-fishing trips.
When tuna season opened on Dec. 1, that became their focus. They really hoped they could get it done on Price’s 23-foot Riddick Bayrunner flat-bottom skiff.
read more at sportfishingmag.com.
