Teresa Croy and her husband Don were fishing a private pond in Putnam County, Ohio, on Nov. 2, and Teresa really wanted to catch some crappies. But after casting small jigs for a while without any luck, she decided to change to a time-honored “garden hackle” bait — a plain old earthworm.
“I just wanted to catch a fish, so I took off the jig and put on an earthworm with a bobber,” she tells Outdoor Life. “Worms catch about everything, and I just wanted a bluegill or catfish – something.”
She noticed a sunken log near shore. And around 11 a.m., she fired off a cast with her old Zebco spin-cast setup and dropped the worm-and-bobber rig just off the log.
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“The worm wasn’t in the water long before the bobber started to move – so I set the hook and the fight was on,” says the retired Ottawa resident. “I hooked the fish near shore, so the fight wasn’t very long. I just reeled it in, grabbed the line above the fish and pulled it onto the bank.”
Teresa didn’t think it was a crappie at first because of how big it was. She just yelled to Don that she’d caught a big one, and he came running down the shore to help. He instantly recognized the fish as a crappie and was stunned by its size.
“We never thought about it being a record fish, but we knew it was a big crappie,”
Teresa says. “We put it in a bucket with water and went back to fishing. But pretty soon, we decided to leave. We just had to show the fish to some friends.”
After showing the fish off to others, then decided they better have it weighed. So they headed to a nearby meat market, where the crappie weighed 3.97 pounds on certified scales. Don took a photo of the scale weight and the fish, but there was nobody else around at the time.
They left the store, did some research, and learned Teresa’s fish was bigger than the current Ohio record white crappie.
“We knew we needed witnesses, so we headed back to the meat market with the fish to weigh it again,” Teresa says laughing. “With a pair of witnesses watching, the fish weighed 3.91 pounds, and measured 18.5 inches long.”
That weight was enough to replace the standing Ohio record for white crappie — but just barely. The previous record, caught by angler Kyle Rock in 1995, weighed 3.90 pounds.
A .01-pound difference is about as narrow as it gets, and it wouldn’t be enough to replace a world record catch, according to the rules set by the International Game Fish Association. But it’s enough to break a record in Ohio, and the Ohio Division of Wildlife certified Teresa’s new record crappie on Jan. 10.
Earlier this week Teresa picked up the mount of her record crappie. She wants to donate it to the Glandorf Rod and Gun Club to hang their new headquarters building. Don is a member of the club, and the pond where Teresa caught her record crappie is on club property. The mount has the crappie poised to eat a minnow and not an earthworm.
“That’s a little different from what I wanted, but I’m still delighted about the whole thing,” she says. “I really didn’t know this was going to be such a big deal when I caught the fish.”
