It was late afternoon and close to dinnertime when Matt Born, of Reedsville, West Virginia, made a long cast with an ultralight outfit. He was fishing from his kayak on a small private pond in Preston County, and he was hoping to catch a bluegill.
“I’d been working on a new small spinning lure design I made the previous night and was seeing how it wiggled in the water,” Born tells Outdoor Life. “I made a couple casts and liked how it was working, so I made a long cast to some lily pads.”
Using ultralight tackle, he had the small spinner tied on 4-pound-test monofilament. But his new lure attracted a much bigger fish than he expected, and the pickerel hit hard.
“I had all kinds of trouble with that fish when I realized it was a big pickerel,” says Born, 49. “The fish towed me around the pond, and I had to quickly back off on my reel drag. I thought it was just a nice-sized pickerel until I got it close to my kayak and saw it was like a huge torpedo.”
The only reason the toothy pickerel didn’t sever Born’s line is because his lure had a long wire body and was attached with a snap swivel. This kept the monofilament outside the fish’s teeth as it chomped down on the metal.
“Every time I got the fish close and touched its gill plate to try and collar it for landing, it dashed away. The fish did that about five times before I could finally get my thumb and forefinger around its head and behind the gill covers to lift it aboard my kayak.”
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By that point, he’d fought the fish for around 10 minutes and was already running late for dinner.
“I called my wife Kristy at home and told her I’d be late because I’d caught a large pickerel that I had to get measured,” says Born. “She wasn’t happy. But she and my dad brought a water tote with an aerator to the lake for the fish. Then my dad and I took it to Morgantown so DNR staff could measure it.”
The two met a pair of West Virginia fisheries biologists, Dustin Smith and Emily Dean, in a Walmart parking lot. They measured and weighed the fish on the tailgate of a pickup truck, where Born’s pickerel officially taped at 27.95 inches long and weighed 6.65 pounds.
Born knew right away that his fish was just big enough to top the previous West Virginia length record, because that state record belongs to him. He’d caught his previous record, a 27.87-inch pickerel, in 2019, and it came from the same pond where he caught the record breaker.
“I have my first pickerel record mounted, and I’m going to have my new record mounted too,” Born says. “They’ll be displayed together – one looking left, the other fish looking right.”
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