Annette Gutierrez embarked on her first-ever fishing trip recently out of Valdez, Alaska, and returned with a monstrous Pacific halibut weighing 335.7 pounds and measuring 88 inches from mouth to tail -- or nearly two feet taller than the 5-foot-6 angler.
Chalk it up to beginner's luck, or Lady Luck, but Gutierrez, a New Mexico resident who works seasonally in Alaska, has joined the elite few to have landed a "barn door" halibut topping 300 pounds.
"It was insane to get such a very big fish my first time," said Gutierrez, in an interview last week with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. "Oh my God, it was huge."
The catch vaulted Gutierrez, 47, a truck driver for a Fairbanks construction firm, into first place in the Valdez Halibut Derby, which will pay $15,000 for the heaviest halibut after the season-long derby ends on Sept. 4.
Her chances of pocketing that money are excellent. The next-biggest halibut is a 193.4-pound specimen caught, ironically, aboard a boat named Lady Luck.
Gutierrez's great flatfish, which was reeled to the surface after a remarkably short 30-minute fight, is the third-heaviest halibut in the derby's 25-year history, excluding a 363.4-pound fish that was disqualified last year because of a rules violation. (The heaviest is a 343.6-pounder landed in 2006.)
To put the novice angler's feat into perspective, the International Game Fish Assn., which for decades has kept track of world records for various line classes, lists only four Pacific halibut as weighing 350 or more pounds. The IGFA's all-tackle world record is a 459-pound behemoth caught in 1999 off Dutch Harbor, Alaska. (An angler last month landed a 350.8-pound halibut while competing in a different derby. That catch is not an IGFA record.)
Gutierrez was fishing with fiance Steve Perkins and his friend, Mike Chambers, owner of the vessel Reelentless. "I've never been anywhere near the ocean or big boats like that in my life," Gutierrez said. "Where I'm from in [Gila], New Mexico is a little, tiny ranch town with a little river running through it."
The fish was hooked during the first hour of fishing and because it was brought up fairly easily nobody assumed it was a rare giant.
"They kept laughing at me and telling me I had a 30- or 40-pounder," Gutierrez said.
It required the strength of all three anglers to haul the massive slab over the rail.
Word had spread of the catch during their return to port and when they arrived, "There were people everywhere," Gutierrez said. "I don't think it even hit me until they hung it up [on the scale], and I said, 'Man, this is big.' I had no clue what I did."
