Jody Hopkins and his son Oden were fishing 33 miles from Ocracoke Island off North Carolina’s Outer Banks on July 13. They were in their family boat, deep jigging in about 700 feet of water.
“They were using heavy ‘glow’ torpedo jigs, trying for deep water fish species,” Amada Macek, a sportfishing specialist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, tells Outdoor Life. “Jody enjoys catching oddball types of deep saltwater fish, and he’s doing a pretty good job of getting them.”
That day, Jody caught a long channel scabbardfish, a strange-looking and silvery fish that he says fought remarkably well, according to Macek. (The Hopkins’ did not respond immediately to a request for comment.) The lengthy and shiny scabbardfish looks a lot like the more common cutlassfish but can only found in extremely deep water.
“Jody had no idea what it was,” Macek says, “and we haven’t seen many of them either in our fisheries division.”
Later on in their day, Oden caught a smaller, but brightly red colored spinycheek scorpionfish. Another unusual deep-water species, they look much like a grouper, only their spines are believed to be venomous. Oden’s fish hit a “glow” torpedo jig, too.
“They use those glow-in-the-dark lures because the water is so deep at 700 feet that there’s no light penetration, and the glow lures help to draw fish,” Macek explains.
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Macek says both the channel scabbardfish and the spinycheek scorpionfish have only recently been recognized by North Carolina fisheries as species eligible for state records. She says that while other big specimens have surely been caught previously by other anglers, the father-son duo are the first to have theirs recognized by the state.
The Hopkins’ fish were weighed at the Neuse Sport Shop in Kinston. Jody’s channel scabbardfish weighed 7-pounds, 3.2-ounces and measured 60 inches long with a 10.25-inch girth. The IGFA all-tackle world record for channel scabbardfish is 12-pounds, caught off Houston in June 2024 by angler Dexter Nguyen.
Oden’s spinycheek scorpionfish is a giant for the species, weighing 4 pounds 6 ounces. Technically, that ties the IGFA all-tackle world record that was caught in May 2015 off the Virginia coast, but in order to replace an IGFA record, a fish has to outweigh the standing record by at least 2 ounces. Macek says the Hopkins aren’t interest in IGFA records, anyways — only state records.
Jody set another new state record in June when he caught a 5-pound. 10.88-ounce bulleye off Ocracoke. The bulleye is another recent addition to the North Carolina record book, and the species is often misidentified by anglers as a bigeye. Both bottomfish are bright red and live in deep water.
Macek says the Hopkins’ two most recent state-record fish are so unusual that they’ve been donated to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for study and preservation.
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