Two-time gold medalist of the 2008 Saipan Micronesian Games Felix T. Sasamoto Jr. created quite a stir these past several days when he successfully harpooned two giant Napoleon wrasses while spearfishing at Obyan Beach.
Total weight of the two behemoth fish, called tangison in Chamorro, is a whopping 201.06 lbs.
Sasamoto first caught a 99.06-lb. Napoleon wrasse last Friday, Jan. 25, at around 9am, and lo and behold, four days later on Tuesday, Jan. 29, on or about 9:30am he followed it up by snaring a 102-lb. tangison.
Surprisingly, Sasamoto said the 99-pounder was harder to catch than the heavier fish. He said he harpooned the first tangison exactly 43 feet inside a cave that had an L-type entrance.
“It lead me about 12 feet from the cave's entrance to were the wrasse was just laying very calmly. Good thing I brought my small flashlight that day, because it was very dark inside,” he said in an email to the Saipan Tribune. “I shot the wrasse very close to below the eye, the spear ending in its brain, but my shaft did not penetrate all the way out. It took me and Tony Roberts about 30 minutes with Tony securing the fish with a heart shot. My shaft turned into a big hook.”
Sasamoto said he found the 102-pounder fours days later at about six feet from the entrance of the same cave.
“This time I shot it behind the eye and it made less of a struggle, but like the recent one it made my shaft turn into a big hook,” he said.
Sasamoto said tangisons commonly swim in deep water from 70 feet to 120 feet. He said it was just his luck that the two fish were swimming in 55 feet of water and he chased them to shallow water.
“The thing about this fish is that you have to know their behavior, in the past I already shot about 12 of them, but they weighed from 12 lbs. to 80 lbs. those were the biggest ones I caught in the past and I caught them from 60 feet up to 80 feet. Imagine going down 80 feet, that is very deep for a free diver to bring up a 40-lb. fish to the surface.”
According to www.wikipedia.org, Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus) is a wrasse that is mainly found in coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific region.
It is also known as humphead wrasse, Maori wrasse, or Napoleonfish. Cantonese refer to it as “So Mei” and Filipinos “Mameng.” It is commonly known for literally attacking and eating Crown-of-Thorns star fish.
Napoleon wrasse is the largest living member of the family Labridae, with males reaching six feet (two meters) in length although females rarely exceed about three feet (one meter). It has thick, fleshy lips and a hump that forms on its head above the eyes, becoming more prominent as the fish ages.
Males range from a bright electric blue to green, a purplish blue, or a relatively dull blue/green. Juveniles and females are red-orange above, and red-orange to white below.
Some males grow very large, with one unconfirmed report of a Napoleon wrasse that was 229cm long and weighed 190.5 kg.
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