Vern Evans
Mississippi fisherman and lure maker Eric Mayo has been on a record-breaking tear over the last five or so years. On April 11, Mayo was fishing his family’s farm pond near his hometown of Petal where he caught the new state-record longear sunfish. He then went back to the same pond the following day and landed another state record, a redspotted sunfish that weighed around a third of a pound.
“I’d already broken the longear sunfish record last year,” Mayo tells Outdoor Life. “So this one actually broke my previous record.”
Both the longear and the redspot were certified by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks on April 21. Mayo says that counting those two most recent catches, he now has 10 state records in multiple categories. MDWFP maintains three separate categories for record catches: one for fish caught on conventional rods and reels, another for fish caught on fly gear, and a third for all other legal sportfishing methods.
“So for the redspot, the longear, and the dollar sunfish, I own both the rod-and-reel and the fly rod records for all three species,” Mayo says. “I almost feel awkward whenever I call the game warden at this point. You know, his phone rings, and he probably looks down and he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s this guy again.’”
Mayo says he caught his record longear on a Z Man micro finesse TRD, which he rigged on a small jighead he made himself. The smaller redspotted sunfish tried eating the same lure, but its mouth wasn’t big enough, so he sized down his hook and baited it with a red worm, and voila.
His record streak isn’t accidental. Mayo has spent his whole career in the fishing industry, and he works at two lure-making facilities near his home in Southeast Mississippi. Boss Outdoors is a lead-casting facility, where they make jig heads, spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, and other tackle for bass fishing. Black Label Tackle is the other company that specializes in soft plastics and balsa wood hard baits.
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This line of work affords Mayo plenty of time for fishing, and he says he first got into chasing state records around 2020. He’d just picked up his first fly rod and, looking at MDWFP’s record book, he realized that many of the entries for smaller species like bream and other panfish were either still open or easily breakable. Mayo already knew where he’d begin.
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Mayo uses a kitchen scale to weigh his panfish, and then he brings them to the local farm store to have them weighed in front of officials on a certified scale. -
The redspotted sunfish is Mayo’s 10th state record in the Mississippi record book.
“I got my thinking cap on, and I thought, ‘man, if I can just go and stock my pond with some of these fish that are low on the record list, and then manage it intensively, I could smash lots of these records.’”
Mayo says around half of his records have come from that private pond. The other five or six have been caught in public waters.
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His first-ever state record, though, was eaten before he could get it certified. This was in 2020 and he was sight fishing for brown bullhead catfish in the pond outside one of the lure factories where he works. It took him a couple weeks, but he finally landed a big bullhead on a streamer. He posted a picture of that fish to a Facebook page, where someone commented that if he did catch it on the fly, it was eligible for a state record in the fly-rod category.
“Sure enough, I had the record. The only problem was I’d given that fish to one of my friends because he wanted to eat it,” Mayo says. “So I called him immediately and told him I need that fish back. He said, ‘Oh man, too late. It’s just skin in a bucket now. It’s done.’”
Now he was determined to break the record, and Mayo went back to that pond every chance he got over the next few months to throw flies at the bigger brown bullheads. He finally landed one heavy enough to certify as a state record — the first of many.
“My unicorn is the spotted bass fly record,” Mayo says. “It’s only four pounds here in Mississippi, which isn’t unbreakable, but that’s still pushing it for a Kentucky spotted bass. And that’s my goal. If I could have the bass record, I’d probably quit at that point.”
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