Chad Isaak’s commercial fishermen get everything in their nets from tree stumps, logs, garbage along with plenty of fish. Occasionally, though, they’ll land something that takes their breath away. It is said that fishing on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River below Chester on Feb. 8, Isaak’s crew pulled in an Asian carp with estimated weight of nearly 90 pounds. The behemoth exceeded the weight limit on their hand-held scale, which topped out at 80 pounds.
Isaak, a veteran commercial fisherman from Carlyle who’s been plying this trade for 25 years, estimated the weight between 85 and 90 pounds. He added that when it was laying next to all of those other fish, it was like two or three of them laying there. Isaak and his crew, Travis Jondro and Scott Kleber, both of Carlyle, were working on their second set of the morning when they discovered the giant bighead carp.
According to Jondro the size of the fish is unbelievable. He also said that they leaned over the boat and bearhugged the fish, with Jondro at the back and Isaak at the head. They gave the net plenty of slack in case the Asian carp put up a fight, which it didn’t. Once they got it in the boat, the trio took a few minutes to marvel at its size. Then Jondro took some pictures on his cell phone of Isaak holding the fish.
Isaak opined that bighead carp normally weigh between seven and 30 pounds, with an average of 15 pounds. Giants are not uncommon, however, in the Mississippi. Last year, Darin Opel, of Worden, shot a 92-pound, 8-ounce bighead carp with a compound bow and arrow while fishing for gar on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River near Alton. The fish was the third-largest bighead carp captured in the world and largest in the Western Hemisphere by a recreational angler.
