Brian said: ‘They’re amazing fish that have adapted to the food they eat. They have front teeth that can bite off barnacles from any underwater structure. They also have molar-like teeth on the top and bottom of their mouths to crush crustaceans.

‘My daughter wants to keep the teeth to put under her pillow for the tooth fairy because they look just like human teeth.’

Dragging the fish from the depths of the ocean was no small feat.

‘Sheepshead are a really hard-fighting fish,’ Brian said.

‘They want to go back to the bottom – often times you can lose them, because they want to go to a structure on the bottom where your line can be cut.

‘Luckily my friend, Kris, told me to back down on the drag so the fish wouldn’t pop the line.

‘A few times it was pulling around 25lb of drag under the boat, so it was a little stressful.’

When Brian saw the monstrous fish, he knew he’d landed a record breaker.

Weighing in at a staggering 16.6lb, it smashed the previous Maryland record of 14.1lb from August 2020, and dwarfed the average sheepshead weight of 3 to 4lb.

Bizarrely, it already had a hook in its mouth that Brian recognized as his own, which had been lost when a fish broke his line an hour before.

Afterwards, the fish was weighed with certified scales at Kool Ice and Seafood Company in Cambridge, Maryland.

Now the record has been officially recognized by the state’s Department of Natural Resources, holding the crown in the Chesapeake Bay Division.

‘I’m pretty excited about it,’ said Brian, from Princess Anne, Maryland.

‘I always knew there was a possibility to break the record.

‘My family also enjoyed eating the fish. Sheepshead is one of my family’s favorite fish to eat.’

It comes after another Chesapeake Bay fisherman, Todd Elder, smashed a world record with his sheepshead catch in May.

Elder claimed a spearfishing record with his 17.4lb sheepshead, as recognized by the International Underwater Spearfishing Association.