Jeffrey Needles caught the brand new state file on a throwline
Jeffrey Needles holds up the brand new Missouri state-record yellow perch alongside his two youngsters. Photograph courtesy of Missouri Dept. of Conservation
Missouri’s first file fish of 2024 is formally within the books. The 12-ounce yellow perch was caught by Jeffrey Needles on Lake Lotawana, a small, 600-acre lake southeast of Kansas Metropolis. Needles was fortunate sufficient to catch the state-record perch whereas fishing the lake along with his household on Jan. 3.
Needles caught the fish on a “throwline” and never a rod-and-reel, so it can fall underneath the Missouri Division of Conservation’s “alternative method” record category. Different different strategies accepted by the state company embody trotlining, spearfishing, and bowfishing. The MDC factors out in a press release that the earlier different strategies file for yellow perch weighed 10 ounces and was caught from a personal pond in 2019.
Needles, who additionally lives within the metropolis of Lake Lotawana, knew concerning the standing file and had lengthy considered beating it. When he headed out to go fishing that morning, he advised his spouse he’d just do that.
“I’d talked about breaking this file quite a bit,” Needles advised the MDC. “My spouse requested me what I used to be doing that day and I jokingly advised her, ‘I’m going out to interrupt the file for yellow perch!’”
The brand new file holder was unavailable for remark. Nonetheless, Out of doors Life touched base with a few the oldsters at MDC who helped affirm and confirm Needles’ state-record perch.
“The climate that day wasn’t too unhealthy, within the 40s, and Needles caught the fish inside an hour of fishing the lake,” Missouri’s file fish coordinator Andrew Branson tells Out of doors Life. “He simply used a bait on a hook and landed the fish.”
Branson explains that Needles contacted the state instantly after catching his yellow perch. He then met MDC fisheries biologist Caleb Pemberton at a close-by grocery retailer in Blue Springs. They weighed and measured the fish on an authorized scale there, and Pemberton positively recognized it as a yellow perch. He additionally helped Needles fill out the mandatory paperwork to certify the file, which was made official on Jan. 11.
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Needles went out of his technique to hold the fish within the water (presumably in a reside nicely) whereas transporting it to and from the grocery retailer. He then launched it alive and nicely again into Lake Lotawana.
“Having my youngsters there for that second made it much more particular.” stated Needles, who plans to have a reproduction mount manufactured from his record-breaking yellow perch.
