When Trade Desk, a 60-foot Hatteras, left Orange Beach for three days of catch-and-release billfishing, hooking a swordfish was just an afterthought, one that would stress all their resources as well as enter the Alabama Saltwater Record Book.

Robert Fritze, his dad (Ron) and four buddies (Harold Wells, Jamie Boyd, Wes Hagler, Robert Parks) had scheduled the trip a while back for August 14-16 with the main goal of finding marlin and sailfish.

“We saw where people were having success catching blues, whites and sails,” said Fritze, who hails from Birmingham. “We headed out southwest and thought about deep-dropping, but that wasn’t the main goal, so we just decided to push on.”

The crew was near the Delta House oil and gas production platform in 4,500 feet of water when they discovered a rip (where two currents meet with distinctive color changes) that was not productive. They headed farther south and picked up a few dolphin (mahi mahi), a wahoo and several barracuda. They had a blue marlin follow one of the barracudas back to the boat, but it spooked and disappeared.

When the sun went down, they started jigging for tuna and put several blackfins in the tuna tubes for possible use as bait the next morning.

Because the offshore boat is not manned by a professional crew, the Fritzes and team took turns getting a little sleep.

“I took the first shift,” Robert said. “My dad came up to relieve me about one. I set a swordfish bait out, a regular nighttime setup with squid and a light.”

The bait soaked for quite a while before the big swordfish swallowed the squid.

“I grabbed the rod and got in the chair,” Robert said. “He was down about 300 feet when he bit. It took about 30 minutes until we saw the fish the first time. He was right at the edge of the spreaders. The bite was nothing special at that point. I could feel the weight, but it wasn’t like ‘Oh, my gosh.’

“Then he came back up, and I saw the bill coming out of the water, and it just kept coming. He got his head out of the water, but it wasn’t like he totally jumped. We got a pretty good profile of the fish, and my buddy, Harold, said, ‘That’s a tank.’”

The fish went down and came back to the surface two more times before it sounded.

“He peeled drag off for a good bit, and then it was a slow, steady going away,” Fritze said. “The drag was a tick, tick, ticking as he was going away. He was headed in the other direction, and there was no stopping him. We were looking at each other, and I was holding myself in the chair, and we were wondering if he was ever going to stop.”

As the line slowly stripped off the reel, the crew could tell the fish had descended to around 800 feet because of a marker on the braided line at that depth.

“Finally, he stopped, and I started getting a little ground on him,” Fritze said. “Then he would take it right back. At first, all I could do was get one full revolution on the handle. Finally, I started to get two or three revolutions, and he started coming to the boat. About halfway, he took a little run, but I slowly worked him back up.”

His buddies started to give Fritze a hard time during the fight, as good friends will often do,

“My friends were giving me great encouragement about how they could do a better job,” he said. “My buddy was taking a video, talking about being one hour in and then four hours in. They got fans out of the engine room to blow on me. They kept telling me that if I got the fish in before daylight that would be great.”

Fritze said they usually bring a large fish bag on offshore trips but had left it at their slip because the tuna bite had been slow, and they weren’t planning to bring any fish back to the dock. Wells, who fortuitously brought his swordfish rod along, had even asked if he should throw the bag on the boat.

“I told him, nah,” Fritze said. “If we leave it here, we’ll probably catch something decent.”

When the big swordfish finally succumbed to the 4.5-hour fight, the action turned into pure chaos.

“We had no flying gaffs, nothing to handle a fish of that caliber,” Fritze said. “We did have enough time to get ropes tied to one of the gaffs to give us a little bit of hope. But we were not necessarily set up to land a big fish like that. He came up 50 feet from the port, and you could see that everybody got ready for all hell to break loose. Dad backed up on him. He got to the corner of the boat and rolled over. I was raising my hands. I was glad it was over.”

With the gaffs on hand, the crew was able to secure the fish and get it ready for the difficult task of getting it onboard.

“I got out of the chair and fell down immediately,” Fritze said. “I didn’t realize my legs were worn out as much as they were. Everybody came down off the bridge, and Dad held the (tuna) door open. We didn’t even have any bigger ropes on the boat. We had to use rod leashes to wrap around his tail to get some leverage on him. Everybody was trying to pull him in, but his pec and dorsal fins were sticking out, so we were moving him around to get him in the door.

“We finally got him in, and we were dumbfounded by the fact we actually got him in the boat.”

Then it dawned on the crew they had to figure out what came next, especially without a big fish bag that would allow the crew to ice the swordfish down.

“We decided we didn’t have a choice; we’d have to go back and clean it,” Fritze said. “It wasn’t going to fit in the box. It didn’t even look real. We headed back. It was supposed to take four hours to get back, but there was a storm between us and Orange Beach that we had to get around.”

Word spread quickly that the boat was coming in with a big fish. A crowd soon gathered at Orange Beach Marina to watch the fish being offloaded and weighed.

Fritze said none of the crew expected the fish to weigh as much as it did. Wells thought it might push the state record, which was set in 2006 at 448 pounds.

“The entire time, it was never in my mind about beating a state record,” he said. “I was just ecstatic to weigh something that big with Dad and my buddies.”

The fish was hoisted onto the boom to be weighed at the marina when dockmaster Jimmy Beason announced, “550.3 pounds.”

“I remember the fight and ride back in, but once he said that it all went blurry,” Fritze said. “I tackled my dad, immediately thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.’ This was all kind of a crazy deal.”

After the celebration, they decided it would be better to preserve the fish prior to inspection by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ (ADCNR) Marine Resources Division as part of the state record application process. Fortunately, J&M Tackle had enough freezer space to accommodate the monster swordfish.

Instead of sitting around and reliving the eventful outing, the anglers refueled the boat and headed back into the Gulf. They caught barrel fish, tilefish and ended up with another six or so dolphin.

“Then the reel went off, and Jamie got in the chair and caught his first sailfish,” Fritze said. “That was the cherry on the top. Then somebody said, ‘We do have to go home eventually.’”

As for the state record swordfish, Fritze never expected to be in the fighting chair for 4.5 hours and ending up with a fish that big.

“It was the fish of many lifetimes,” he said. “Doing it with my dad meant a lot. He bought his first saltwater boat when I was 5. We’ve never sat on the beach. All we’ve ever done is fish.”

Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources