orgensen and his boat captain, Jason Boyll, hooked the grouper near a coral reef off Fort Myers, Fla., in the Gulf of Mexico. He says they used a banded rudderfish as bait and didn’t have to wait long for the action to begin.

“Within five minutes of fishing, Jason got a bite on his reel,” Jorgensen wrote. “He started reeling and the line got very tight. A giant Warsaw had taken the bait!”

Boyll and Jorgensen took turns cranking the fishing rod to haul in the grouper. They counted 20 minutes of “fight time” before they finally reeled it in, after an epic battle that involved about 122 metres (400 feet) of fishing line.