Destin crew lands 536-pound bluefin tuna on marlin trip

A Destin bachelor-party marlin trip turned into a heavyweight bluefin surprise when Raise ’Em Up came home with a 536-pound tuna after an hour-and-a-half fight, a catch that says as much about the Gulf’s spring offshore spread as it does about one memorable fish.

Scott Boone was on the rod when the bluefin ate, with Capt. Hunter Forbes and the rest of the crew working the fish carefully to the tuna door. The boat had already spent the morning on blue marlin and had put a smaller blue marlin in the boat before the tuna showed up, turning the trip into a mixed offshore day instead of a dedicated tuna run. Boone, who lives in Santa Rosa Beach and is getting married in a few weeks, got a pre-wedding story that will be hard to top.

Forbes said the crew was fishing about 70 miles offshore in roughly 1,800 feet of water near the FADs, the kind of deepwater setup that can stack bait and draw in big pelagics. That makes the catch especially noteworthy for Destin anglers watching the spring pattern unfold. When conditions line up around temperature breaks, current edges and floating structure, the same lanes that hold billfish can also produce giant tuna.

Raise ’Em Up is a 68-foot F&S sportfisher built in 2007 and based in Destin. The April 28 crew included Forbes, Halen Filson, Nim Frazier, Barrett Gilley and Travis Meyer, all part of the grind that got the bluefin to the boat after a long pull. It was the sort of trip where the billfish bite and tuna bite collided in the same patch of offshore water, and the tuna was the fish that turned heads.

The Destin catch lands in the shadow of another giant local bluefin from April 2024, when Flat Dangerous put a 888-pound fish on the dock about 67 miles south of Destin. That tuna was widely described as the largest ever caught in Florida, but it did not count as a state record because multiple anglers took turns fighting it. The official bluefin benchmark remains the International Game Fish Association’s all-tackle world record of 1,496 pounds, caught by Ken Fraser off Nova Scotia in 1979.