Alligator Gar Released in Texas Could Be Largest Ever Captured by a Female

It was just after sunset on August 31 when Paul Myers, a well-known fishing guide on the Texas coast, settled into a private beach with his client Emilie Song. He rigged three heavy spinning rods with cut tilapia as bait and cast them into the backwater bayou.

“I have fished that spot for years and it delivers [a lot] of big fish,” Myers says Outdoor living“And that night the conditions were perfect for the alligator pike.”

Around 10:30 p.m., one of the rods went down. And before she realized what she had on the line, Song had the biggest fish of her life on the hook.

“Emilie’s biggest fish that night was a 6-pound bass,” said Myers, a full-time schoolteacher in Houston who has been a part-time guide for eight years. “She had her hands full with that gar. It took her about 30 minutes to bring it to the shallows and land it.”

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Myers says the huge gar made several long, powerful runs, stripping nearly 100 yards of 100-pound braided line. But the 1/0 hook held.

“She had a hard time with that fish. She told me she thought the rod would melt in her hands.”

Song eventually maneuvered the oversized gator gar into shallow water, where Myers looped a rope around the fish and pulled it ashore. They measured the gar at 100 inches long with a 50-inch girth. And after snapping a few photos of Song lying next to the massive fish, they released it back into the bayou.

“Emilie was overjoyed,” Myers said. “We don’t kill or weigh alligator gar because they’re too valuable as a living resource. … I don’t like to estimate the weight of the fish, but I’d say it was close to 300 pounds.”

That estimate, while unconfirmed, is consistent 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) estimates the total weight of the fish at 312 or 285 pounds.

Theoretically, that 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 organization that keeps track of the record also recognizes several world records in the line class in both a men’s and women’s division, and the largest ever gar record approved in the women’s division weighed approximately 132 pounds.

Song’s fish was likely much heavier than that weight, but because they didn’t use an IGFA-approved leader and they never weighed the fish, her gar doesn’t qualify for a world record. Still, Myers believes it’s the largest alligator gar ever caught by a female angler.

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“It’s the third biggest one I’ve ever put a guest on,” Myers said. told Chr.. “I’ve been in contact with most of the guides and I’ve asked. No one knows of a female angler who’s caught an 8-footer before.”

Myers, who has caught nine fish over 8 feet in the past four years, says Song’s gar also had a tag. He explains that his friend tagged the fish about two or three years ago, when it was 97 inches long with a girth of 43 inches.

After releasing the giant fish, they continued until about 3 a.m. Song caught eight more alligator pike, ranging from four to six 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, one of the state’s most famous alligator gar fisheries. The only clue he’ll share is that it’s a brackish tributary that flows into Galveston Bay somewhere in Harris County.

Bob McNally