The afternoon of June 18, Jack Backman of Harrisburg, South Dakota and his buddy Garrett Johnson were fishing from Backman’s 18-foot Lund aluminum boat on 220-acre Wall Lake near the town of Wall, South Dakota.
They started fishing at 3 p.m., and about 5:30 Backman spotted a good-size fish on his boat’s forward-facing sonar.
“It was suspended two feet down in 14 feet of water,” Backman tells Wired2fish. “It was about 30 feet away from a tree, hanging near it when I made a cast.”
Backman tossed a ¼-ounce black Northland tungsten jig with a full nightcrawler attached to it toward the mark. He thought it was a crappie because it was smaller than the walleye he was targeting. He used spinning tackle with 10-pound test braided line tied to an 8-pound test fluorocarbon leader.
“The fish hit immediately when it saw my lure, and I thought for sure it was a good crappie,” said the soon-to-be freshman at Lake Area Technical College in Watertown, N.D. “When I saw it and its colors I knew it was a pumpkinseed. I’ve caught them in other lakes in other states like Iowa and North Dakota. I didn’t know Wall Lake had ‘em.”
Backman eased the fish toward his boat and Johnson netted it. They had no scale in their boat to weigh the fish, but learned the current state record pumpkinseed was only 12 ounces. So, they figured Backman’s big fish might be a record for South Dakota.
They called a friend who had a Bubba scale, met with him, and it registered just over one pound for Backman’s fish. They knew they had to get the pumpkinseed weighed on a certified scale and went into a nearby grocery store where they convinced an employee to weigh the fish.
On certified scales it officially weighed one pound, easily topping the previous 12-ounce state record pumpkinseed caught by Pat McCart in 1970 from Lake Carthage.
They made a video of weighing the pumpkinseed, filled out paperwork for record authorization, and now the state has officially accepted Backman’s fish as the South Dakota record.
IGFA only has one pumpkinseed in its records, which is the all-tackle world record caught in 2016 by New York angler Robert Warne. It weighed 1 pound, 8 ounces.
“I’ve fished Wall Lake previously and never knew or saw a pumpkinseed in it,” says Backman. “But the state fisheries folks say they’re in the lake.
“I still have the fish in my freezer, and I’ve been pretty busy working. But I will have a taxidermist mount made of it. They sure are pretty fish.”
