Keith Lusher 08.26.26
Ryan Stogner went to Venice, Louisiana, hoping to catch speckled trout. Instead, a canceled charter put him in front of one of the biggest tripletail ever caught in the state. Stogner, of Walker, Louisiana, and his friend Jacob May of Baton Rouge had planned a trout trip on July 1, but when their morning charter was canceled, the two anglers began looking for another option.
They eventually connected with Capt. Kyle Landry of Fish Venice Charters, who happened to have the afternoon open. Landry gave them a choice between chasing redfish or tripletail.
For Stogner, it wasn’t much of a decision. “I’ve been trying to catch a tripletail the past three or four years,” Stogner said. “I’ve probably gone after them five or six times on trips with friends. It’s always been a bucket-list fish for me.” By the end of the afternoon, Stogner could cross tripletail off that list twice.
The first few stops produced nothing as Landry worked several offshore structures. Then the anglers reached another rig, and everything changed. Fishing a live shrimp beneath a cork in about 8 feet of water, Stogner hooked a tripletail that weighed 25 pounds.
For most anglers, that fish alone would have made the trip. Landry later caught another tripletail weighing about 12 pounds, and the action convinced the captain to stay put.
About 10 minutes later, Landry noticed Stogner’s cork barely move. “He told me, ‘He’s on,’” Stogner said. Stogner reeled until the line came tight, set the hook and immediately tried to hand the rod to May, who had not caught a tripletail yet. May refused. “He said, ‘No, you hooked it, you reel it in,’” Stogner said..
At first, Stogner had no idea what was attached to the other end of the line. “I didn’t know when I hooked it how big it was gonna be,” he said. The fish initially moved away from the structure and toward the boat as Landry backed away from the rig. When the tripletail came close, Landry made an attempt with the net but couldn’t quite get underneath it.
That’s when the fish took off. The tripletail peeled approximately 70 yards of line from the reel and headed back toward the platform. Stogner managed to stop it before it could reach the rig, then began the job of working the fish back toward the boat. “It took probably about 10 minutes to get him in,” Stogner said. “He just stuck to the bottom and was just a heavy, hard-fighting fish.”
When Landry finally slipped the net beneath it, everyone aboard knew they had something special. Even the captain underestimated it. “He thought it was a 30-pounder, 32-pounder,” Stogner said. “He had no idea it was gonna be 37 pounds.”
A scale aboard the boat showed the tripletail was pushing 40 pounds, but the anglers continued fishing before returning to Cypress Cove Marina in Venice. There, the fish officially weighed 37 pounds and measured 38 inches long. If its place in the Louisiana record book is approved, the fish ranks fourth among tripletail caught from state waters.
The Louisiana record is 39.5 pounds, a fish that has stood atop the state list since 1959. The world record is just over 40 pounds, putting Stogner’s fish only a few pounds from the biggest tripletail ever documented. “That size is probably one in a million fish,” Stogner said.
