Free Republic

- Now that's a whopper — a very old whopper! A 240-pound (108.8 kilograms) sturgeon that could be more than 100 years old was caught last week in the Detroit River by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The "real life river monster" was nearly 7 feet (2.1 meters) long, The typical lifespan is 55 years for a male sturgeon and 70 to 100 years for females, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Frozen round goby, a tasty snack for a sturgeon, was used as bait on a long line that was deep in the river. All sturgeon...

ALTON, Ill. - It sounds like the sort of tale Mark Twain might have cooked up: A man fishing in the Mississippi River hauls in a blue catfish roughly the size of a sixth-grader. But this is no fish story. Early Sunday, Tim Pruitt caught a 124-pound blue catfish. To get a sense of just how big that is, the state record holder was a mere 85 pounds and the world record holder tipped the scales at 121 pounds, 8 ounces. Now, Pruitt, whose fish has already been weighed in the presence of a conservation police officer and measured by...

Norwegian Catches Halibut Too Big for Boat 2 hours, 52 minutes ago Strange News - AP OSLO, Norway - Unlike many fishermen, Harald Skoge didn't have to exaggerate the size of his latest catch. The 321-pound halibut was too big for his nearly 29-foot boat. Skoge, who fishes as a hobby, was trying his luck off western Norway with a simple hook and line on Wednesday when he thought something had gone wrong. "At first, I thought the hook had gotten stuck at the bottom," the retiree was quoted as saying in Friday's edition of his local newspaper, Sunnmoersposten. Slowly,...