Oooops! Should have checked first.

[M R Dux]

Had a client trip Tuesday and the guys wanted to fish for Redears and gills. I spent 4 hours Monday side scanning beds and looking for active beds.

Tuesday we hit the first spot and caught two decent Redears right off the bat. Then came a couple dozen 7-8” gills that the guys didn’t want to keep. We ended up catching a couple of 9”+ gills they kept.

We moved to a couple more stakebeds and one of the guys hooked a better fish. After a quick fight we boated a fish I had no idea what it was! It was some kind of sucker. I never fished streams or creeks that had suckers. I took a couple pics and dropped it back in.

The guys soon decided to pull cranks for crappie. We had a good rest of the trip. When we got back to the resort, I sent a quick text note and a couple of the pics to our state fisheries biologist. I told him about the catch and release.

Almost instantly I got a return text that started with NOOOOOOO! The next line said you just released a new state record Spotted Sucker!

Apparently it is a species that isn’t common to Ky Lake and they grow small in their normal stream habitat. I told the lucky angler and we got a good laugh out of it. I don’t know if being a state record holder in the Spotted Sucker column was a big deal to him.

I caught and gave away a new state record yellow perch on Ky Lake a few years ago. Once I checked the record book and realized my mistake, I called my buddy who had just cleaned it! Oh well, you would think I would have learned my lesson. I’ll check before releasing the next odd-ball catch!


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