It was just after dark on Aug. 31 when Paul Myers, a well-known fishing guide on the Texas coast, settled into a spot on a privately owned shoreline with his client Emilie Song. He rigged three heavy-duty spinning rods with cut tilapia as bait, and then casted them out into the backwater bayou.
“I’ve fished that spot for years, and it produces [a lot] of great fish,” Myers tells Outdoor Life. “And conditions were perfect for alligator gar that night.”
Around 10:30 p.m., one of the rods went down. And before she even realized what she had on the line, Song was hooked to the biggest fish of her life.
“Before that night, Emilie’s biggest fish was a 6-pound bass,” says Myers, a full-time schoolteacher in Houston who’s been guiding part-time for eight years. “She had her hands full with that gar. It took her about 30 minutes to bring it into the shallows and land it.”
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Myers says the massive gar made several long, powerful runs, stripping off nearly 100 yards of 100-pound braid. But the 1/0 hook held fast.
“She had a hard time with that fish. She told me she thought the rod was going to melt into her hands.”
Song finally maneuvered the oversized gator gar into shallows, where Myers got a rope around the fish and pulled it onto shore. They measured the gar at 100 inches long with a 50-inch girth. And after snapping a few photographs of Song lying beside the massive fish, they released it back into the bayou.
“Emilie was ecstatic,” said Myers. “We don’t kill or weigh alligator gar because they’re too valuable as a live resource … I hate to estimate fish weights, but I’d say it was close to 300 pounds.”
That estimate, while unconfirmed, falls in line with some of the formulas used to estimate a fish’s weight. Plugging the gar’s length and girth into two of those traditional formulas (one used by Trout Unlimited and the other by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources) puts the fish’s rough total weight at either 312 or 285 pounds.
Theoretically, this would put Song’s alligator gar in contention for the world record. The IGFA all-tackle world record for the species is 283 pounds, and that fish was caught on Texas’ Sam Rayburn Lake in 2023. But the record-keeping organization also recognizes several line-class world records in both a men’s and a women’s division, and the largest-ever gar record approved in the women’s division weighed around 132 pounds.
Song’s fish most likely dwarfed that weight, but because they weren’t using an IGFA-approved leader and because they never weighed the fish, her gar is not eligible for world-record consideration. Still, Myers thinks it could be the biggest alligator gar ever caught by a female angler anywhere.
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“It’s the third largest I’ve put a guest on,” Myers told Chron. “I keep in contact with most guides, and I asked. Nobody knows of a female angler catching an 8-footer before.”
Myers, who has landed nine fish over 8 feet in the last four years, says that Song’s gar also had a tag in it. He explains that his friend tagged the fish around two or three years ago, when it measured 97 inches long with a 43-inch girth.
After releasing the giant fish, they kept at it until around 3 a.m., and Song landed eight more alligator gar between 4 and 6 feet long.
Myers wouldn’t reveal the exact spot where he and Song caught the gar. But he says it wasn’t the Trinity River, which is one of the better-known alligator gar fisheries in the state. The only clue he’s willing to share is that it’s a brackish feeder stream that dumps into Galveston Bay somewhere in Harris County.
