An angler fishing roughly 40 miles off the Washington coast reeled in a striped marlin weighing 151 pounds on Saturday, a catch that could break a state record that has stood for more than two decades. Tim Durheim, who is from Prineville, Oregon, was trolling for albacore tuna aboard the charter boat Four Sea'sons when the marlin struck.
Durheim hooked the fish on an Edge rod rigged with 80-pound braided line and a black-and-pink jig, according to the Bend Bulletin. He said the marlin struck twice near the surface before diving, kicking off a fight that lasted a little over an hour before the fish was finally landed. The vessel was skippered by Captain Robbie Norman for Sea Breeze Charters, which operates out of the Ilwaco Marina near the mouth of the Columbia River.
The fish measured 8.5 feet long, according to facts reported by MLive.com. If confirmed, the 151-pound marlin would surpass the current Washington state record of 134 pounds, set by Phil Wolff off Westport on September 2, 2005 — a mark that has held for more than 20 years.
How a Record Gets Verified
Before Durheim's catch can officially claim the title, it has to clear a strict administrative gauntlet. The marlin was first weighed on a certified digital scale at Sportsmen's Canning at the Ilwaco Marina, then transported to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's field office in Montesano for inspection by an agency biologist, as detailed by the Chinook Observer.
Under WDFW's record rules, candidate fish must be weighed on certified equipment and inspected by a state biologist within seven days of capture, and cannot be frozen before or during that certification. Applicants also have to submit unedited color photographs of the full fish next to a measuring tape. WDFW must formally confirm the catch before it becomes an official state record, and while preliminary biological confirmation at the Montesano office makes certification likely, sign-off has not yet been finalized.
A Warm-Water Visitor Far From Home
Striped marlin are anything but regular visitors to Washington waters. The Chinook Observer described the species as a warm-water vagrant anomaly in the Pacific Northwest, and WDFW classifies them under its Other Food Fish category — a designation for species that show up irregularly in coastal waters during summer months, carrying a daily recreational possession limit of two fish per person. That same category covers other warm-water strays like mahi-mahi, swordfish, opah, yellowtail, and white sea bass.
The first recorded Pacific Northwest striped marlin catch came in 1997, when anglers landed a 104-pound fish off Grays Harbor. Striped marlin are often caught in years with El Niño conditions, and the species requires water warmer than 24 degrees Celsius, or about 75.2 degrees Fahrenheit, to spawn — meaning every specimen found off Washington is a non-breeding adult or sub-adult riding a temporary warm current, according to research from Fisheries New Zealand. Satellite tagging has shown individual striped marlin migrating thousands of miles between Australia, Hawaii, and North America.
Part of a Pattern Along the Coast
This is not the first time warm water has pushed exotic species into Washington's fishing grounds. In August 2023, WDFW verified a state-record 21-pound mahi-mahi caught off Westport in water measuring 70 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking a previous mahi-mahi record set out of Ilwaco in 2013, according to MyNorthwest.com. And in August 2025, warm currents moving north brought a cluster of four striped marlin landed off the Oregon coast in a single weekend, per the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which noted that billfish migrate beyond their usual range when warm water carries dense schools of forage fish north with it.
An even bigger warm-water surge hit the region in August 2019, when anglers landed more than 20 Pacific bluefin tuna — including one topping 90 pounds — plus thresher sharks and mahi-mahi off Ilwaco and Westport, according to the Outdoor Line. Typical bluefin caught off Washington run under 20 pounds, making that year's larger arrivals a notable signal of unusual ocean conditions, much like this year's marlin.
Globally, striped marlin can grow past 13 feet and 450 pounds, with an all-tackle world record of 494 pounds recognized by the International Game Fish Association, according to Marlin Magazine. That makes Durheim's 151-pound fish a medium-sized specimen for the species even as it stands to become the biggest one ever officially logged in Washington waters. Washington's coastline also supports salmon runs including chinook, coho, pink, sockeye and chum, along with trout, bass, walleye, halibut and rockfish, but for anglers chasing something rarer, the pending marlin record is the catch of the season.
