On April 7, 15-year-old Jaylynn Parker of New Richmond, Ohio pulled in a 101-pound, 56-inch blue catfish on a jugline from a creek behind a household good friend’s home. The Outdoor Writers of Ohio, a non-governmental group of outside media professionals that maintains the state’s fish document database, is at present deciding whether or not to call the fish because the formal state document.
Parker was juglining along with her dad, Chuck, and household good friend Jeff Sams on a tributary of the Ohio River behind Sams’ home. It was Parker’s flip to verify the traces, and when she did, she found {that a} blue cat weighing nearly as a lot as her was on the opposite finish, her tells the Cincinnati Enquirer. Her dad and Sams helped her haul the fish in.
“The older I get, the extra pleasure [fishing] brings me,” Parker says. “It’s so stress-free. It brings me a lot peace and happiness.”
Each retailer with an authorized scale was closed on the Sunday afternoon, so the Parkers took the fish residence and stored it in a bait tank tied to a dock on the lake of their yard. On April 8, they drove the fish to Bethel Feed and Provide for licensed measurements. The blue cat formally weighed 101.11 kilos and measured 56 inches in size and 39 inches in girth.
The household then efficiently released the fish, Parker’s mother Kristen wrote in a Facebook post. As soon as it wriggled again into the murky depths, Parker and Sams leapt into the water in celebration.
The catch raised a little bit of a firestorm on social media over Ohio’s juglining guidelines and the way the document system mixes float-line information with rod-and-reel information. One commenter on a publish within the OWO Facebook page tried to accuse the Parkers and Sams of juglining illegally, since Ohio regulations require that juglines be “attended always.” However seeing as how the very level and follow of juglining is to set them, exit the water, after which verify the traces periodically, that phrase isn’t to be interpreted as requiring an angler to remain bodily subsequent to the jugline all day, DNR inland fisheries program administrator Scott Hale tells Out of doors Life.
“Juglines are authorized if you have a tendency them in some style and have identification connected to them,” he says. “That half’s simple.”
The Parkers known as DNR to substantiate the catch. Recreation wardens checked all their gear and confirmed that the jugs had been marked with their names and addresses. However Hale says that the OWO’s File Fish Committee continues to be figuring out whether or not this fish will rely or not.
“We’ll see what the OWO committee decides, however hopefully, we’re celebrating a brand new blue catfish document,” he says.
Extra debate sprung up over whether or not a fish caught on a jugline ought to be acknowledged alongside Ohio’s rod-and-reel information. As OWO member Chip Hart wrote within the group’s Fb web page, the Committee acknowledges a separate bowfishing class, and dialogue of a separate jug and trotline class will come up on the OWO convention this month.
“I’d be onerous pressed … to assume anybody would disagree with the necessity to set up a brand new class,” Hart wrote. “In late April, this will probably be taken up by the membership on the annual convention. Within the meantime, there ought to solely be reward for the younger girl and the household that caught the fish.”
The OWO didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon Parker’s pending document fish.
Learn Subsequent: Two Kentucky Anglers Pull a Massive, 94-Pound Blue Cat Out of the Ohio River
The current Ohio blue catfish record is 96 kilos and 54 ½ inches in size. Chris Rolph of Williamsburg caught the fish on the Ohio River on June 11, 2009.
“It’s been a number of years because it was damaged,” Hale says. “If this fish finally ends up being the document, it’s going to most likely be a very long time earlier than it’s damaged as nicely. Fish this huge are very previous and fairly uncommon.”
