A buddy and I were fishing out of Ketchikan back in 1990 targeting silvers, there were still a few kings around but we didn't really expect to find any so we decided to use our steelhead gear for the silvers.
He was using a G-Loomis 1025 with an Ambassador that was spooled with 155 yards of 8 lbs. Maxima Ultragreen (which had not been changed after the previous winter steely season). In the first hour, we each hooked a few silvers and a king which went 33 lbs, this would end up being the warmup for the big one.
At 2:15 while he was on the head with his pants around his ankles and his rod sitting in the rod holder (we had been mooching) his rod gets hammered. I grab the rod and holler at him that I think he's got a big halibut on and to come take care of it, I wanted to get back to fishing. He comes stumbling out and proceeds to fight this fish that I was sure was a butt, after 20-30 minutes of this stalemate, I almost had him convinced to cut the line, that's when the fish came off the bottom and jumped about 20 feet from the boat, all 57 lbs of chrome chinook.
We chased that fish for almost 4 miles and 6 hours before finally netting it at 8:00 p.m., when we arrived back at the resort there was about 200 people on the dock that had been listening to my radio transmissions with the resort on our progress with the fish, among those people was a reporter from the Ketchikan news, our picture made the front page the next day.
At the time that fish was 4 lbs. shy of the line class world record.