Micaiah Thompson and his friend Dan Ginn had other plans this Super Bowl Sunday. Instead of watching the game on the couch, the two fishermen decided to take five kids from a church youth group ice fishing. The group headed out that afternoon to the 85-acre Lake of Three Fires, which is located in the state park of the same name in Iowa’s Taylor County.
“The kids wanted to catch panfish, and Three Fires is loaded with them,” Thompson tells Outdoor Life. “They started catching bluegills left and right. But Dan and I were after walleyes, so we were trying for them with jigs and minnows. We had some tip-ups out, too.”
The seven anglers were scattered around a tapering point in the lake that dropped from 3 to 17 feet. Using sonar, Thompson was jigging around a deep brush pile he’d found that was loaded with fish.
“It was about 6 p.m., full dark, and we were picking up to leave when I had a good size fish I saw on sonar come for my lure,” says Thompson, 35, of Greenfield. “The fish missed it. But I had another green jig and a minnow deep down in a second hole nearby, and the fish hit that one hard.”
Using a small ice-fishing outfit rigged with 10-pound-test braided line and a 4-pound monofilament leader, Thompson worked in the heavy fish during a one-minute fight.
“I thought it was a walleye the whole time, even when I got it up into the ice hole,” he says. “I didn’t have a flashlight, so Dan came over to help me get the fish up. Its mouth was so big we thought it was a walleye. Only when he put his flashlight on it did we know it was a crappie.”
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He was disappointed at first because it wasn’t a walleye. Then he realized the size of the huge crappie. They weighed the fish that night on a scale they had, which read 4.1 pounds. Because it was Super Bowl Sunday and most places were closed, they didn’t get the crappie officially weighed until two days later.
The anglers originally wanted to keep the crappie alive, so they kept it in an aerated bait bucket filled with cold water. On Feb. 10, after they had the fish weighed on a certified scale at a lumberyard, they realized the fish wasn’t going to make it and decided to keep it. The black crappie weighed 3.95 pounds, topping the previous Iowa record of 3.88 pounds that was caught in 2013.
“We had to wait until an official from the state came to positively identify it as a black crappie before I knew it was a record catch,” says Thompson. “My crappie was 17.8 inches long, and Dan caught another crappie earlier that measured 17.2 inches long — nearly as big as mine.”
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