Two World Records Were Set Here. Only One of Them Is Legal to Chase.

Two records, and one very persistent mistake. The bonefish is the famous one: a 16 lb fish taken about 300 yards from the Bimini Big Game Club with Ansil Saunders on the pole, still standing more than fifty years on. If what you want is to fish the same water rather than the same record, you can book a guide who fishes that same water and be on that flat inside twenty minutes of leaving the dock.

The grouper is the one nobody mentions, and it is arguably the more interesting of the two, because the species that holds it is now Critically Endangered. Neither record is a target you can chase in the ordinary sense any more, which we will get to.

The number almost everyone gets wrong

The all-tackle world record bonefish is 16 lb. Not 16 lb 3 oz.

16 lb 3 oz is a real number attached to a real fish, which is exactly why it spreads. It is Florida’s state record, per the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission — a different category, a different jurisdiction, a different fish. Somewhere the two got welded together, and now the Florida figure turns up on Bahamian pages, resort pages and fishing blogs describing the Bimini fish. Once you know to look for it you see it everywhere.

A figure that appears on a lot of pages is not thereby verified. It might just be one page, copied a lot.

The two records, side by side

The bonefish measured 33.5 inches long with a 19 inch girth, which is a genuinely absurd shape for a fish that lives in water you can stand up in. It also remains the largest bonefish ever taken on 12 lb line class. Worth sitting with for a moment: it was caught roughly 300 yards from a hotel, from the Big Game Club dock, on a flat that people walk past every day.

Which one you can legally chase

The bonefish. With conditions.

Since 9 January 2017 the Bahamas Flats Fishing Regulations make bonefish catch-and-release only on the flats, ban commercial flats harvest, and require an angler licence for anyone fishing the flats for bonefish, permit, tarpon, cobia or snook. So a record-weight bonefish is now a photograph and a measurement, not a scale. Thats a better outcome than it sounds — the species is IUCN Near Threatened, and the fishery that produced the record is still producing fish because of exactly this. Everything else about it is on the bonefish species page.

The grouper, no. Nassau grouper was uplisted to Critically Endangered in 2018 after an estimated 60% decline over three generations, is fully protected from harvest in US federal waters, and is closed nationally in the Bahamas every year from 1 December to 28 February — no take, no landing, no processing, no sale. Outside the closure, any grouper landed must keep its head, tail and skin intact so the species can be verified at the dock. We wrote up why the Nassau grouper is closed December to February separately, because the reason is the fish’s own biology and it is a good story.

The third Bimini record nobody counts

Line-class records are a whole parallel universe of record-keeping and almost nobody outside the sport pays attention to them. There is one at Bimini worth knowing: a fly-tackle line-class yellowtail snapper, 1 lb 8 oz, Austin Porter, 15 July 2017.

A pound and a half. Set at the same island as a 38 lb grouper. Thats the thing about line-class records — they are a record of a constraint, not of a monster, and there are far more of them going unclaimed than people realise.

The wider claim you will see about this island is that around fifty world records have been set here. We have not been able to audit that count against the IGFA database ourselves, so we repeat it as industry lore rather than as a figure, and we would rather name three we can point at than fifty we cannot.

How to check us

Openly: our record figures come from IGFA-sourced secondary reporting and from the IGFA’s own published tributes to Ansil Saunders, not from a live query against the association’s record database, which we could not access during research. The Florida state-record claim comes from the FWC. If you have access to the live IGFA database and find we are wrong on any figure here, we would genuinely like to know.

That is the whole method, and it is why this piece sits in the section about why this island fishes the way it does rather than in a listicle. The fish that made the reputation are worth getting right. If you want the biology behind the bonefish half, the flats piece goes into what makes them unusual, and the grouper piece handles the closed season in full.