Two Missouri fishermen set state, world records
Two state record fish were recorded in the Duck Creek Conservation Area in southeast Missouri last month, and one of them is a world-record bowfishing catch.
Fairdealing resident Mitchell Dering caught a 4-pound brown bullhead on March 14 while bowfishing — a new world record, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation — and Tyler Goodale of Doniphan lured an 11-ounce flier on March 26.
The previous Missouri bowfish record for a brown bullhead, a species of catfish, was 2-pounds, 7-ounces, and was caught in Wappapello Lake in 1994. The previous bowfishing world record was 3 pounds and 4 ounces.
Dering, who also caught a state-record spotted gar back in 2019, attributed his catch to good luck.
“I got off work that day and went out to one of the ditches in Duck Creek and just got lucky honestly,” said Dering, who shot the fish at Duck Creek spot No. 105. “We shoot a lot of smaller fish. I knew it was a bullhead, but didn’t know if was a brown bullhead. But I knew it was large for its size.”
Later in the month, when Goodale caught two identical record fliers (sunfish), he used a pole-and-line method.
The previous state record for a flier was 10 ounces. It was caught from a private pond in 1991.
Goodale, like Dering, also knows the feeling of reeling in a world-record catch. In 2020, Goodale caught a 5-pound, 4-ounce spotter sucker at Duck Creek, a record that still stands.
Three state fish records were broken in the first three months of the 2023. In January, Travis Uebinger, of Auxvasse, was fishing on the Osage River Jan. 15 when he caught an 11-pound, 5-ounce blue sucker using the pole-and-line method.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Two Missouri fishermen set state, world records
