INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Angler Hooks Massive Seven-Foot-Long Halibut In Norway

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 02:56 PST, Jun 3, 2015

A young Swedish angler recently managed to catch a massive halibut, which measured seven-feet-long and weighed in at over 220 pounds.

Erik Axner, 24, hooked the giant halibut while in Norway, off the Lofoten Islands, according to the Daily Mail. Axner was fishing with friends Jonathan Jansson and Martin Bamberg, and had deployed a four pound coalfish bait from a float when the halibut struck. Considered the world’s largest species of flatfish, the halibut began a fight with Axner that took over an hour to come to its conclusion.

“It could have been a five kg fish when the float went down, but when I set the hook I knew it was big,” Axner noted. “The fish was so powerful that it took me an hour to get the better of it. By the time I got the fish to the boat my arms were aching and my back was pretty tired as well.”

When Axner brought the massive halibut alongside his boat, he and his friends were stunned by its size. Measuring over seven-feet-long, the halibut weighed roughly 220 pounds, meaning it was large enough to field around 250 filets. Axner quickly realized that if he were to bring the halibut aboard to photograph it, he would harm the giant fish, so he donned his drysuit and jumped in the water.

“I wanted to get some good pictures together with the fish and the only way to do that without harming it was to go into the water together with it,” he asserted. “Being in the water with a fish that size is a powerful experience – it gives you a whole new level of respect for the fish. After we took some photos we released the fish to fight another day.”

While an astonishing catch, Axner’s halibut is far from the largest ever encountered. That distinction belongs to a 515 pound halibut that was landed in 2013 by German angler Marco Liebenow, as the Inquisitr previously reported. Halibut typically can grow to lengths of 15 feet, with a life expectancy of 50 years. Though it is impossible to know exactly how old Axner’s halibut actually was, the young fisherman attests that it was, like him, between 20 and 30-years-old, according to the Mirror.

Though the anglers returned the fish to the sea instead of keeping it, Axner nevertheless described his encounter with the seven-foot-long halibut as an “unbelievable experience.”

[Photo by Eric Axner/ BNPS via the Daily Mail]

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