David Ashman of Mohnton, Pennsylvania was on vacation at Hatteras, North Carolina and booked a day of saltwater fishing aboard the Miss Hatteras party boat on July 31.
“I’ve fished from party boats all my life, and about once a year I sign up for a day on the Miss Hatteras,” Ashman told Outdoor Life. “I always book trips alone and meet some nice folks from other places when I’m on a head boat.”
Ashman, 63, has fished on party boats from Washington State to the Carolinas, catching everything from striped bass and salmon to tuna, and now one record-breaking cubera snapper.
“It was a nice hot summer day, pretty calm when we headed offshore about 20 or 30 miles,” says the commercial truck driver. “I brought my own tackle, which is kind of lightweight, because we usually catch smaller vermilion snapper and other fish like that.”
His personal tackle consisted of a 6.5-foot Shimano rod and an Avet MXL 5.8 revolving spool reel spooled with 40-pound test braided line with a 50-pound leader.
“It was the last drop of the day in about 200 feet of water,” says Ashman. “They announced that we should reel ‘em up. But the small piece of squid I’d just dropped down took off on a steady, heavy run. I thought for sure it was a shark.”
Ashman fought the mystery fish for about 20 minutes, then finally brought it close to the boat where a mate used a long-handle gaff to reach down and hook the fish and bring it aboard.
“They told me it was a big cubera snapper,” he recalled. “I’d never seen one before, but they sure have some teeth.”
Ashman says he’d hooked the fish right on the edge of its mouth, so its teeth didn’t sever his leader. The boat crew thought the fish might be a state record, and when the Miss Hatteras got back to shore that evening, Ashman took the fish a short distance to another marina that had a certified scale.
The fish weighed 85 pounds, and marina staff helped Ashman fill out all required information for his cubera snapper to be recorded the state.
The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries has just awarded Ashman with the state record for his 85-pound cubera snapper. The fish had a 56-inch total length and a 40-inch girth. Ashman’s fish crushed the previous state cubera record of 58.5 pounds caught in 2022 by Thomas Madsen.
While Atlantic cubera snapper range widely from Nova Scotia to Brazil, fish of the size that Ashman caught are rare as far north as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
The world record Atlantic cubera weighed 124 pounds, 12 ounces, taken off Louisiana in 2007 by angler Marion Rose.
“That little Shimano rod of mine has caught some big fish before, but an 85-pound snapper is the tops,” Ashman says.
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