Wisconsinite Alan Hintz has been ice fishing for more than 50 years, and he’s fished a lot of places in that time: from small ponds in the Midwest to Canadian rivers to the famed waters of Lake Erie. Over the weekend, Alan and his brother Dale traveled to North Dakota, where they booked a trip on Devil’s Lake with Perch Patrol Guide Service.
“It was kind of a slow day to be honest,” Hintz tells Outdoor Life. “We were fishing Pelican Bay for most of the morning and only had three fish in the bucket by noon.”
That’s when their guide, Tyler Elshaug, decided it was time to make a change. Before he moved the two brothers, Elshaug drilled a couple prospect holes and tested them out himself.
“The spot we were fishing is known for quality over quantity,” says Elshaug, who’s been guiding on Devil’s Lake for 10 years. “I went out and drilled a couple holes and dropped my LiveScope down to look around. I saw a few fish and caught one almost immediately, so I went back and shifted the guys over to the new spot.”
Using Buck-Shot Rattle Spoons tipped with minnow heads, Dale and Alan dropped their lines into the water. Within a few minutes, Dale’s spoon was bitten off by a pike. Dale called Elshaug into the shanty, and the guide was taking the rod back to his truck to re-rig when Alan noticed a large shape on the transducer. The fish was moving towards his own bait, and at first, he thought it was the same pike.
“But in fishing you never know,” Alan says. “So, I left my spoon down there and started working the fish. It struck hard and I missed it the first time, but as soon as I dropped back down, it hit again, and the fight was on.”
Mayhem ensued as the fish made several hard runs. It tangled Alan’s line with the transducer, then wrapped around the second dead-stick line that was between the two brothers. Dale leapt down and started untangling the mess, making plenty of noise in the process.
“I could hear the guys yelling from where I was sitting in my truck,” Elshaug says. “So, with Dale’s rod still in my hand, I walked over and poked my head into the shanty, and it was just chaos. I asked Alan if he had a good one on, but he said he thought it was just a pike.”
Still convinced he was hooked up to a northern, Alan calmed down and fought the fish while Dale cleared his line. Then he brought the fish up near the bottom of the hole, where all three men saw it was a giant yellow perch.
“Our jaws just dropped,” Alan says. “Tyler dropped Dale’s rod and dove for the hole and grabbed the fish, and then all three of us lost our minds. Tyler got his tape and measured it at sixteen and a half inches and said, ‘Man we have to weigh this thing.’”
The three broke down their setup and headed for a local bait shop with a certified scale. Knowing the perch was a potential record, Tyler called a game warden, who met them at the shop to weigh and certify the fish.
Alan’s yellow perch tipped the scales at 2.99 pounds, which should just top the current North Dakota record: a 2-pound 15-ounce perch caught from Devil’s Lake in 1982. According to the state’s rules around fishing records, “all weights must be rounded to the nearest ounce.” This would put Alan’s perch at 2 pounds 16 ounces, or 3 pounds even. That should be enough to replace the 44-year-old state record, as there is no minimum weight for replacing a standing record in North Dakota, as there is in other record books. (The International Game Fish Association, for example, requires a new record fish to outweigh the current record by at least two ounces.)
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The Hintz brothers will have to wait, however, before anything is made official. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department requires a waiting period of at least four weeks before recognizing a new state record.
“I still have to wait a few weeks for all the paperwork to go through,” says Alan, who has long dreamed of pulling a record through the ice. “Regardless, it’s still the biggest perch I’ve ever caught, and one heck of a memory.”
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