"Sometimes," he said, "it takes a while to get into the bite.'' Not this time, however. "I didn't have my line down 10 minutes, and I had Big Bertha on,'' Davis said. Of course, he didn't know that at first, in part because he didn't expect to find a monster halibut in such relatively shallow water so close to shore. This was not, Davis said, the place he would go looking for a trophy halibut. He was thinking more of finding 15- to 30-pound fish, maybe something bigger. "It felt like a little chicken halibut nibbling on it,'' he added, "and then I set the hook, and then it was like I hooked the bottom.'' Davis means that literally. The thought that he had hooked something on the bottom is part of the reason he gave the rod over to Bower at one point.

"I traded off with my camera guy in the boat to see if he could do anything, because I couldn't move it,'' Davis said. "It was like hooking into a submarine.'' For some time, the two men weren't sure what was lurking unseen at the end of the line. Davis started thinking he might have hooked into some kelp down deep and the movement he felt was it swaying in the current as the tide changed. Then he and Bower discussed the possibility they might have snagged into a shark. "I just didn't know what I had,'' Davis said. Whatever it was, he added, it moved when it wanted to move, and otherwise just seemed to hang on the bottom and ignore the yanking and tugging on the 110-pound-test fishing line. Though Davis was using 110-pound-test line, the nearest, larger, line-class in the IGFA record book is for 130-pound-test line. Davis's fish would have competed in that category where the record is a 242-pound halibut caught near Dutch Harbor in 1999. That fish was puny compared with the one that locked Davis in a standoff for a long time. For the first 40 minutes, Davis said, "we thought we were never going to get this thing off the bottom.'' Finally, ready to give up or try anything, the two men fired up the outboard on the skiff, tightened the drag down on the reel as tight as they could, braced the rod against the side of the boat, and began trying to tow the fish off the bottom. Fighting the fish with the boat is a major violation of IGFA rules, but it is what finally enabled Davis and Bower to move this halibut. Once they got the fish off the bottom and moving, Davis added, the struggle didn't last much longer, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, but then other problems arose. "When he did come u, he was quite a ways behind the skiff,'' Davis said. "He looked like a whale back there. "We thought, 'Oh man, how are we going to get that thing in the boat?' We thought about letting him go, but that (lure had) the only one of those jig skirts I had. It was just sent to me by a manufacturer I've been working with. I didn't want to lose that.'' The two men discussed what to do, and quickly decided they weren't getting the fish in the boat. "That fish weighed more than Nick and I, the only two guys in the boat, and it was half as long as the boat we were in,'' Davis said. "We were in a 20-foot aluminum skiff and the fish was 91 inches (just shy of 8 feet) long. It was almost as long and wide as a sheet of plywood. "I knew we were in all kinds of trouble. "A fish that big, even if you could get it in the boat, it would bust the bottom out and sink you.'' So they decided they would try to harpoon the halibut and tow it back to the hatchery. Only by this time, they had worn the fish to exhaustion, so instead of swimming beside the boat, it hung down like dead weight on Davis' line.

"He was straight up and down,'' Davis said, which made it impossible to drive a harpoon through the halibut's head. "At that point,'' Davis said, "I thought we were still going to lose him. I thought for sure I was going to break him off.'' He had the drag on his reel cranked down as tight as he could get it and was only hoping the braided Dacron "Tuf-Line" would hold. To get the fish up into position so they could harpoon it, the men again began towing. With the tow, Davis said, the big halibut came up on a plane just like a sheet of plywood, and they drove the harpoon home, tied the line attached to it off on the stern of the skiff and started for the hatchery. "We had to tow him about a mile and a half,'' Davis said. "Every once in a while, he'd go crazy and pull the boat around.'' At the dock, they shot the fish twice to kill it -- another big IGFA rule violation -- and then hoisted it out of the water with a crane. Davis, who has consulted the IGFA rule book since making his catch, believes this is another rule violation. Apparently, he said, anglers are required to land the fish themselves -- not pull them out of the water with heavy equipment even if the latter seems appropriate. He's still a little unsure, however, of how one lands a fish like this without heavy equipment. A 400-pound halibut, he said, is so big it would even be hard for two men to pull it up on a beach. Processing a fish like this, he added, is its own ordeal. "It was a good couple hour deal butchering him up,'' Davis said. "It was kind of like eating an elephant; you just had to keep working at it. "You've got a filet a foot thick. ... You can't flip it over. It was a lot of work. "I'm glad I got one of that size, but I really don't want to do it again. It's really overwhelming to deal with a fish like that." Overwhelming, but still the thrill of a lifetime. Davis noted that he might not have any records for this fish, but "I've got bragging rights.''

What might be the largest Pacific halibut ever documented was pulled from the Bering Sea off St. Lawrence Island on Sept. 5 by the crew of the fishing boat Miss Mary. The 8-foot, 2-inch behemoth tipped the scales at 553 pounds, according to crewman Barry Davis of Anchorage, who provided photographs of the fish taken aboard the long liner skippered by his brother, Pat, from Seattle. No official records are kept on the size of commercially caught halibut in Alaska, but the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Wildlife Notebook Series says the "largest ever recorded for the Northern Pacific was a 495-pound fish caught near Petersburg, Alaska.'' The International Pacific Halibut Commission, which manages halibut in the North Pacific, pegs the largest fish at an estimated 500 pounds. According to an IPHC publication: "In 1974, an 8 foot, age 33 female was caught commercially in the Bering Sea, weighing 375 pounds gutted and estimated at 500 pounds whole." The fish caught earlier this month was two inches longer, at 98 inches. It outweighs by almost 100 pounds the sport-fishing record, set by Jack Tragis of Fairbanks near Dutch Harbor in 1996. That halibut tipped the scales at 459 pounds. The Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Marine Fisheries Service claims halibut grow as big as 300 kilograms (more than 600 pounds), but there is no evidence of anyone ever having seen such a fish in the Pacific. In the Atlantic there are historic reports of 9-foot-long flatfish weighing 700 pounds. Barry Davis said he'd never seen anything quite like the monster that latched onto one of a string of about 1,000 hooks soaking about a mile and a half off St. Lawrence. Almost as soon as the Miss Mary began hauling up the line, he said, "the captain could feel (the halibut) down there. He knew there was a big fish coming up.'' Davis said everyone rushed to the rail of the 58-foot fising boat.

"It was a beautiful day out there,'' he said, with clear skies and enough sunlight to penetrate the water down to about 40 feet. That's where the crew of the Miss Mary got a look at what appeared to be a bus coming up from a depth of about 210 feet. "It was alive,'' Barry Davis said. "It took all five of us to get it on board. It was kind of hard getting him over the rail. We had five gaffs in him. We weren't going to let him go.''

The fish was eventually delivered to a processor, or most of it was delivered.

"We're going to get the tail mounted,'' Davis said. The tail alone measures 24 ½ inches across -- about the size of a big rainbow trout.

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