Angler reels in a likely world record

It was shaping up to be another wonderful outing for the 27 members of the International Longshoremen's Association Local 970.

The group had chartered the Rudee Angler head boat out of Rudee Inlet in Virginia Beach. They were all set to catch a mess of sea bass and tilefish at several offshore locations.

When the boat pulled out of its slip well before dawn two weekends ago, Heath Cataulin was just as excited as the rest of his work mates.

Until several hours later, when he hooked up with something huge on the deep bottom 70 miles offshore.

Many on the boat figured whatever was tugging at Cataulin's line likely was a big tilefish - or maybe two at once. Or it could have been one of the big snowy grouper some on the boat had already caught.

But nobody on the boat suspected a world-record yellowedge grouper.

The waters off Virginia along the edges of the Norfolk Canyon in the past couple of years have become the place to catch world-record tilefish and snowy grouper.

Now the state can add the yellowedge to its already impressive resume of offshore bottom species.

"At first, nobody knew exactly what it was," said Cataulin, 28, of Norfolk. "We knew it was a grouper, and it kind of looked like one of the snowies. But it didn't have the white spots on it."

The telltale sign was that many of the fish's fins were edged in bright yellow.

On the ride back to port, Skip Feller, the boat's captain, radioed the Virginia Beach Fishing Center and described the catch. Someone then notified Julie Ball, a Virginia International Game Fish Association representative.

Ball recommended that Cataulin get an accurate weight on the fishing center's scales. She then made an appointment to meet Cataulin at Long Bay Pointe Marina the following morning.

There, the fish was certified as a yellowedge grouper and as a pending world all-tackle record.

Cataulin's fish weighed 46 pounds, 2 ounces. The current world record is a 41-1 caught from the Gulf of Mexico in 1998. "It was huge," Cataulin said. "It wouldn't fit in anybody's cooler. We ended up putting it in the boat's big ice chest."

For Cataulin, the thought of catching a world-record fish of any species is foreign.

"I fish off the beach mostly," he said. "This was only the second time I've ever been offshore like that.

"Almost everybody on the boat caught a citation sea bass, and they all caught tilefish. I didn't get a citation or a tilefish. I mostly caught dogfish and bluefish. A couple of the guys caught big snowy grouper."

Even though his day's catch differed greatly from those of the other anglers on the trip, Cataulin rates the trip as his best fishing day ever.

"It was for everybody, I think. So many great fish were caught," he said. "And I'm pretty amazed at what I've done."

Lee Tolliver, (757) 222-5844, lee.tolliver@pilotonline.com