Fishermen reel in a sea behemoth that breaks NC record: ‘It’s hard to put into words’

Brandon Carney and his father headed out into the Atlantic Ocean full of fishermen’s eagerness, unaware that a beast with the bulk of a small moose lurked hundreds of feet below.

They dropped their line 50 miles off Beaufort Inlet, baiting it with albacore belly, then waited over 1,300 feet of water until the monster struck. When their electric reel failed, 59-year-old Cary Carney fought the creature by hand.

“He’s one of those old-school guys,” Brandon Carney said of his father. “His arm might be hanging off, but he won’t let you know it. After about 30 minutes, it rose to about 20 feet below the surface and we could see how big it was.”

Two hours later, Cary Carney hauled in the biggest swordfish ever recorded in North Carolina, weighing 504 pounds. It stretched 12.5 feet long from the end of its tail to the tip of its bill. By itself, the bill measured 47 inches — roughly the height of a second-grade child.

“It’s hard to put into words,” said Brandon Carney, who captained his 32-foot boat. “You don’t go out thinking you’re going to break a state record.”

Swordfish superlatives

The Carneys and their crew can boast even louder considering:

1. They shattered the previous North Carolina record swordfish, caught in 1979, which weighed a comparably light 441 pounds.

2. They had hooked swordfish before the record-breaking August expedition, but had never reeled one in.

“I haven’t told anybody that,” Brandon said. “I feel like everybody’s going to hate me. There are people who dedicate their life to this stuff.”

Also, the Carneys brought little of the gear one might require for such a giant fish. They had no harpoon.

So when the fish gave up the fight, they tied a rope around its bill and ran a rope to the boat’s T-top frame, using it as a pulley. Once on board, the swordfish was lying in a semicircle around the boat, its tail on one side and the bill on the other.

For the envious, the state Division of Marine Fisheries provided some of the more technical details: Carney used a 65-pound test line, hand-cranked on a Diawa MP3000 reel, paired to a 6-foot Crowder DDS80 rod. For more of this detail, see Sport Fishing magazine.

But it takes little expertise to know what followed the mandatory fish photo.

“We kept all the meat,” Brandon Carney said.

“Probably 30 people have eaten it at this point. We’re still eating it.”