Quebec fisher pulls 244-pound Atlantic halibut out in Saguenay, breaks record

Contact Nature CEO Marc-André Galbrand explains how a Quebec fisher hauled a nearly two-metre, 244-pound Atlantic halibut out of the Saguenay fjord.

The fish was THIS big!

A Quebec fisher pulled a 244-pound (110-kilogram) Atlantic halibut out of the Saguenay Fjord, breaking the record for the scientific winter fishery project run by the Musee du Fjord.

With the 27th catch of the season, Alain Hamel and his team pulled the massive female out of the water after battling it for two-and-a-half hours.

A crab was found in her stomach.

Contact Nature CEO Marc-André Galbrand is the president of the Comité de bassin de la baie des Ha! Ha!, which has the scientific permit allowing Atlantic halibut catches.

“Really an amazing catch that is,” he said of the almost two-metre-long fish. “[It is a] really cool thing that happened in our scientific project.”

The catch dwarfed the 109-pound halibut caught last year.

The fish Hamel hauled in may not have been the biggest on a line this year.

“The day after that, that halibut got caught, there was a guy who was fishing. He started it at 10 o’clock in the morning, and at 4:30 at night, he was still on the line, and the halibut got up, at the time, he gave a big hit, and it broke everything,” said Galbrand. “He lost it after almost seven hours of fighting the halibut.”

Galbrand said that some fishers have spoken about being on the line for 12 to 16 hours, only for the fish to break the line and get away.

He said only expert fishers with good technique can haul in the fish, which average between 120 and 150 pounds. He said Hamel’s catch was unique, particularly as it was caught while ice fishing.

“You really have to be patient, and you have to have a good technique,” he said. “You have to tire out the halibut, bring it slowly, have a good team around you.”

The Atlantic Halibut Winter Fishing Project for Scientific Purposes limits the number of catches to 35 in a season, and 100 total since 2022.

“Studies suggest that the populations of some groundfish species in the Saguenay Fjord are ‘sink populations,’ which means that they are isolated from those of the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence,” Fisheries Canada says.

“In the case of Atlantic halibut, this issue has been little studied, and DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) lacks data to test this hypothesis. Therefore, the data collected during the project will help advance knowledge on the species.”

Galbrand explained that more and more Atlantic halibut have been returning to the Saguenay region.

“Ten years ago, we would never really see people catching Atlantic halibut,” he said. “Since the last four years, we’ve been getting a lot, and this year, we had so many halibut that we’re getting out that we had to suspend our scientific permit.”

In the past two weeks, 18 Atlantic halibut were pulled out.