Record Breaking Paddlefish Caught
I have a sister that lives in Arkansas, and about once a year I will go visit her for a week and will hook me a paddlefish or two.
Yes, I bring all my fishing gear with me. I’m not a maniac, ya know.
Anyway, I will drive down with my camper and my fishing gear; and my wife and I will spend the week visiting with my sister and her husband.
It’s great because they live right on a lake so the vast majority of the day is spent fishing. At night we’ll cook what we caught that day. Not a bad way to spend a week.
Arkansas is one damn fine place to spend a week fishing. Heck, even an afternoon fishing there is like someone airdropped a little bit of heaven down to you.
I’ve never caught anything that you can particularly call record breaking on these trips to visit the family, but there are some folks that I read about recently that caught something that absolutely defied description.
A fisherman named Mike Schleeper was on Beaver Lake when he relled in a one hundred and twenty seven pound, six ounce paddlefish.
According to Mike, he was fishing for striper with his friend Tom when the fish was hooked. Being an experienced angler, he knew that something was up when it took him almost an hour to reel in this massive sea creature.
He was quoted as saying that he had been fishing in the area for over twelve years and had caught some stripers that were in excess of thirty pounds.
He continued by saying that he knew that the paddlefish wasn’t what he was used to catching because the fish kept pulling on the rod and kept going.
At any rate, at about the half hour mark he was able to finally reel the monster in and when its whole body finally came all the way out of the water he was in for a definite shock.
Expecting something around thirty pounds and finding something in excess of a hundred must have been quite a shock to the senses.
It’s another record setting fish and as we all know, records eventually get broken. I cannot wait to see what the one that eventually beats this looks like.
