Have a DAY.
Back on January 25th, fisherman Ed Green from Northhampton, Pennsylvania pulled in a massive 16.3 pound walleye while ice fishing on Lake Ontario’s Chaumont Bay, according to Field & Stream.
Needless to say, it was probably a bittersweet moment for Green, considering the walleye was just two pounds shy of the New York state record.
However, Green’s guide, Louis Pagnetti, also admitted that the 16.3 pounder may be the biggest walleye that’s ever been pulled through the ice at Chaumont Bay.
Green told the outlet:
“Louis at Chaumont Masters called me that week and said he could almost guarantee good fishing if I came up. He’s really got those fish dialed in so I said, ‘I’ll be there.’
There were marks everywhere on the fish finder screen,” Green said. “We were running Panoptix with that new jigging Rapala—the Shadow Rap. We had the jigs tipped with minnow heads. They could not resist those things.
I didn’t know what the hell I had on, I fought it for 15 minutes. The best part was getting it up to the surface. It was the coolest thing ever. My wife and I were sitting in the shack next to each other, and we see this giant thing moving around beneath us. We could see it really clearly because the ice was so thin.”
Green’s fish was a whopping 31 1/4 inches and had a girth of 20 inches.
The current New York walleye record stands at 18 pounds two ounces, and was caught in the St. Lawrence River, not far from Chaumont Bay.
Green admitted that he thinks the next state record will come from one of those two locations:
“I think the next state record is probably going to come out of that same area. I ended up letting this fish go. But who knows, come early May, it could put on another pound or two.”
