An Alabama man smashed a world record last month by landing a 92-pound grass carp — just nine days after the previous record had been broken in the same area.
“A lot of times when you see a good fish in the water, you don’t realize just how big it is until you bring it up,” said Bryan Hughes, the angler who broke the record, and the president of the North Alabama hunting supply business Backwater Outdoors. “But this one I knew right away was as big as anything I’d ever seen.”
Each year, millions go fishing in the hopes of landing a record-breaking catch. According to the latest available statistics, some 49.81 million anglers and fishermen — 10 million of whom were between the ages of six and 17 — did so in 2013, yet the only report of a record breaking catch that year was of Caleb Newton. The Virginian plumber caught a 17-pound, 6-ounce northern snakehead.
Hughes’ 92-pound whopper was — obviously — quite a bit bigger, and required a bit more muscle. If they wanted a chance to wrangle the fish out of the water, they were going to need another line in the monster, so Hughes’s fishing buddy Scott Jennings and his fiance, Madison Browning, both took shots at the fish — and missed.
“I was kinda starting to panic. I told them, ‘Please, will somebody shoot this fish again?’ I was getting a little frustrated,” said Hughes. “We had so many lines tangled from everybody going around in circles that Scott had to go to the back of the boat and get another bow to finally make the shot.”
Coming in at an official weight of 92-pounds, and a size of 52.5 inches long, 39 inches around, the monstrosity was big enough to land Hughes the world record, but not big enough to win him the tournament in which he’d actually caught the beast. Another fisher pulled in a greater total stringer weight, and took home the win.
