On the evening of May 3, David Selle was fishing the 200-acre Cedar Lake within sight of Minneapolis’ skyline. He and his pal Dylan had been catching good-sized crappies and some largemouth bass during a bug hatch that had turned on fish to feed late that afternoon.
“It was a perfect night for fishing, and there were bugs in the air that we call ‘fish flies,’” Selle, 48, told Wired2fish. “The fish were so turned on coming up to feed on the flies they were like sharks.”
The Day’s Grand Finale
Most of the feeding fish were crappies, but there were some largemouth bass rising to gobble up the flies, too. The pair of anglers were catching both crappies and bass, when Selle hooked a heavy fish around 6 p.m. He was in six feet of water using spinning tackle and a plastic body jig of his design from a bobber.
“It was the last light of day when I hooked the fish, fought it to the boat, and Dylan netted it,” said Selle, a resident of Lino Lakes, Minnesota. “We knew it was a big one, and we weighed it on a scale we had in the boat — and it showed the fish was 4.17 pounds.”
The anglers knew it was a state record weight black crappie. But Selle releases most of the fish he catches and wanted to toss it back into Cedar Lake. Dylan stopped him, knowing they needed to get the fish weighed on certified scales for a possible record.
Making it Official
“It was Sunday and nothing was open where we could weigh the fish,” Selle said. “The only place we found open that had a scale was a nearby Walmart. So that’s where we headed.”
The anglers had the crappie in a cooler when they pulled into the Walmart parking lot. They walked into the store, headed to the deli department, and asked a young clerk if they could get a certified weight for the possible record-breaking crappie.
The clerk agreed to weigh the fish. A printed label from the Walmart deli certified scale showed that the fish weighed 4.1 pounds.
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) officials still needed to see the fish for weighing, measuring, and verifying that it indeed was a black crappie. So the anglers kept the fish in an iced cooler overnight. The next day, they went to a nearby DNR office — where the fish officially weighed 4.1 pounds, with an 18-inch length and a girth just over 16 inches.
Confirming a New State Record
Selle’s crappie has now been certified by the state DNR as Minnesota’s record black crappie. His fish topped the previous record of three pounds, 13 ounces, caught in October 2024 by 8-year old Axel Angelow, who also caught his record-size black crappie from Cedar Lake.
Selle says he’s a dedicated angler who fishes about every day at many of Minnesota’s hundreds of fish-filled lakes.
“A buddy of mine is having my record crappie mounted for me,” he says. “My pal Eric Frank already has taken it to a taxidermist and when I get it back, I’ll hang it on a wall in my home.”
