This 16-pound almaco jack is a pending record in the International Game Fish Association 30-pound line class for the species.

Gina Larkin was out for revenge. Minutes earlier she’d been caught off guard by a big almaco jack, cousin to one of the ocean’s most notorious brawlers, the greater amberjack. She had skillfully played a sailfish on light spinning tackle that morning, but when the jack made off with a pinfish tethered to 24 ounces of lead and a heavy bottom-fishing rod, poor Gina was no better prepared than a tennis pro airlifted into a rugby scrum.

It didn’t help that Capt. Dennis Forgione, who stepped in big brother-like to finish that fight, mentioned the wide-open list of ladies’ line-class records in the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) book. “Coulda been a record, Gina,” he said.

Now the gloves were off and Gina was ready to rumble. She adjusted her fighting belt, which sported a “Girls Kick Ass!” sticker.

“You’re all by yourself on this one,” Forgione advised, going through the basic rules for IGFA qualification. “No one

else can touch the rod. When you feel the fish, just start reeling—fast.”

Forgione motored his 32-foot Free Spool upcurrent, and dropped another pinfish to the reef below. His color fishfinder,

in split-screen zoom mode, showed a couple of tiny spikes on the bottom, details I might’ve missed had he not pointed them out. There was just enough northbound current to offset the effects of a north wind; our slow drift over those spikes meant certain death for Gina’s pinfish.

This time, Gina was on her game. When the strike came, she bent her knees, lowering her center of gravity, and went to work with short strokes, letting the rod and reel do the work.

Up popped another almaco, which Forgione leadered and slung over the gunnel. It weighed just over 10 pounds, not huge, but likely a first entry in the new IGFA ladies’ 80-pound line class—reason enough for cockpit celebration.

“Now let’s try one on 30-pound gear,” the captain said, smiling reassuringly.

“C’mon Gina, let see whatcha got,” I added.

Gina’s next fish would test her endurance and pull the scale down to 16.5 pounds—a pending record of respectable size in the 30-pound tackle class.

We were on an isolated piece of structure in about 200 feet of water, one of many spots logged by Forgione over decades of fishing off Miami. The initial plan was to tie Gina to a black grouper, but the fierce jacks waylaid our baits on every drop.

Ho-hum, some anglers would say, just more amberjacks. That’s what I said when Dennis hoisted the first fish over the side. It looked like an AJ at first glance, but then Dennis pointed and said, “It’s an almaco. See the long dorsal fin?”

If you don’t look twice, it’s easy to mistake an almaco for a greater amberjack. That long, sickle-shaped fin is one way to tell them apart; the almaco’s deeper, more compressed profile is another. The almaco basically looks like a greater amberjack that head-butted a reef. The characteristic dark band through the eye, as angry looking a mark as any in nature, is present on both fish.

Almacos in the 10- to 20-pound range, and sometimes larger, are an incidental catch on reefs and wrecks around the Florida coastline. They often tag along with greater amberjacks, mostly around structure in deeper than 100 feet of water. Juveniles are at times abundant along sargassum lines offshore, and occasionally around ocean buoys. Some anglers say the almacos are better eating than their close kin; others have no opinion, heretofore unaware of the separate identity of the AJ lookalike.

Forgione wasn’t too surprised to find a gang of these tough fighters around his offshore spot.

“The big ones make something of a run this time of year, showing up in late winter on through the spring,” he said. “Last week I was catching them in 340 feet of water, and it’s nice to see these fish moving in shallower. We’ll probably have them here dependably for a few weeks, then they might move on to another spot.”

Despite their reputation as an incidental catch—and a robber of grouper baits—in December 1999 almacos were adopted for line-class record consideration by the International Game Fish Association based in Dania Beach, Florida. The promotion added some formal sporting credibility to these hard-pulling bottom fish. Anglers, of course, have long been acquainted with the gamesmanship of amberjacks and their relatives.

Gina Larkin, who works in the advertising industry in Fort Lauderdale, was new to the vertical tug-of-war event, having already claimed the high-jumping sailfish as her personal favorite. After fighting a few almacos, she learned that the harder you pull on a jack in deep water, the harder it pulls back. And, where grouper often relent once you drag them clear of the bottom, amberjacks act as if they own the whole water column.