Chris Cavanaugh was fishing for scup from the beach along Buzzards Bay when he hooked something much bigger. He figured it must be a striped bass, until he wrestled it ashore and got a good look at it. Then he didn't know what he had.
What do you do with a 45-inch, 40-lb mystery fish?
If you're Chris Cavanaugh, you do the right thing. You take the photo - and then you release it.
Kevin Blinkoff, of On The Water magazine, identified the fish from the photo as a Red Drum. That's a southern species common in the Gulf of Mexico, typically coming no farther north than southern New Jersey. In their range Red Drum are doing well as a species, so maybe it's not so fantastic for an outlier to appear here and there in Cape Cod waters. But it is unusual. Kevin says in his ten years at the magazine, this is just the third Red Drum landing he can remember.
Kevin talks about the story in this week's Fishing News - the audio is posted above. You'll also hear the fishing roundup, with details on the good week region-wide for striped bass, the further arrival of bluefish to our waters, and the first local reports of bluefin tuna. Give it a listen.
You can read the full story of Chris Cavanaugh's landing a Red Drum at On The Water. It's great fishing tale.
