Charlie Conway had a day off from his plumbing job on Oct. 13 and decided to go fishing. He headed to a long-time favorite shoreline spot in a cove of sprawling 89,000-acre Lake Texoma, on the Texas-Oklahoma border.
“I’d been fishing that spot in Soldier Creek with my family forever – since I was about 4-years old,” Conway told Wired2fish. “It’s only a couple miles from where I live in Kingston. We catch a lot of crappies there, but I was after bass that day, maybe stripers.”
Conway was fishing alone with his yellow Labrador retriever Marley. He started casting the brush and timber strewn area with a bass-action bait-casting rod and Quantum reel spooled with 30-pound test braided line, no leader.
“The water is a little off-color, so no fluorocarbon leader is needed, which turned out to be a good thing,” said the 27-year-old angler. “I was casting a 1.5-inch no-name silver-blue blade bait that looked like a shad. We’ve had two great shad spawns this year, and everything is eating ‘em. I think I paid $1 for the lure in a tackle store discount bin.”
Conway made a cast about 9:30 a.m., started a steady retrieve in about 3 feet of water when his lure stopped. He thought he’d snagged an old dock or brush. But then something took off with his lure, line zipping through the water.
“That’s when I thought I’d hooked a bass or a striper, but then it jumped and I saw it was a gar,” he said. “The gar jumped near shore, and when it did about 18-inches of my carbon rod tip broke off.”
Conway manhandled the fish with his shorter rod, and after a short 30-second fight he had the gar on the bank.
“I thought it was a gator gar, but when I looked at its teeth, I knew it had to be a shortnose or spotted gar,” said Conway, who bowfishes the lake a lot and knows the species available. “I’d never seen a spotted or snortnose gar that big and thought I better call a local game officer and tell him what I had.”
The warden contacted a nearby state fish hatchery, and they sent a couple fisheries staffers to look at Conway’s gar, which was big enough for a possible state record.
As Conway waited for the fisheries folks a nearby resident drove up in a golf cart. The man saw Conway with his big gar and offered to dash home for a big tub he could fill with water to keep the fish alive.
“I never learned that person’s name, but him coming back with a tub for water let me keep the fish alive,” Conway explained.
The state folks arrived, confirmed the fish was a spotted gar and got a certified weight and measurements of the fish. It weighed 10-pounds, 8.96-ounces, with a 37.7-inch length and a 13.125-inch girth.
Conway’s spotted gar is confirmed as the new Oklahoma state record, easily topping the old 4-pound, 15-ounce spotted gar that also was caught from Lake Texoma.
His fish also is large enough to be the new IGFA world record spotted gar, which weighed 9-pounds, 12-ounces, caught from Lake Mexia, Texas in 1994 by Rick Rivard. However, Conway’s broken rod during the fish fight may disqualify the catch for IGFA.
Conway doesn’t know if he’ll enter it for an IGFA all tackle world record review. But he’s delighted with his certified state record catch. He has his record gar frozen and will be taking it to a taxidermist for mounting.
“I’m going to hang that spotted gar mount in my living room, along with my broken rod, and the $1 bent blade bait lure I caught the fish with,” he said.
