Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408040057
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Until one day this week.
That was when George Wood tangled with a 31-pound, 4-ounce northern pike that is expected to go into Virginia's record book.
Wood and his son, Scott, were on a catfish outing, dunking chunks of chicken livers hoping to entice a whiskered channel cat. Motts Run can be a tough lake to fish. The basin was scraped clean when it was built, and it has banks that fall off sharply, leaving little structure.
Wood was working one of the lake's shallow areas, fishing from a johnboat in about 3 feet of water, when his rod suddenly bowed and a 41-inch fish with a head that looked a bit like an alligator rolled to the surface.
One thing was for certain: Wood knew it wasn't a catfish. He reported fighting it for more than an hour before Scott was able to get close enough to net it.
Motts Run is one of a handful of impoundments across the state stocked with northern pike by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. In 1989, it produced a 27-pound, 9-ounce catch.
The state record is a 27-pound, 12-ounce pike from Hungry Mother State Park lake near Marion. It was landed by Richard Bowman in early September 1987.
Wood's fish is nearly four pounds heavier, and that's after losing a significant amount of weight while waiting to be weighed by a representative of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. When Wood first weighed it, it sank the scales to the 34-pound mark.
Record candidates, however, must be weighed by a game and fish department representative, and that didn't happen until the next day. The official weight and other data now is in the hands of the department's record fish committee, which is expected to act on it the next couple of weeks.
The committee recently established a 66-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish as a record. The 50.4-inch fish was wrestled from the Appomattox River in late June by Larry Clarkson of Newport News. The previous record was a 57-pound, 8-ounce fish from the Rappahannock River.
Other records established this year include a 4-pound, 12-ounce crappie landed from a private pond near Clarksville and a 66-pound, 4-ounce flathead catfish caught from Occoquan Reservoir.
MORE CATCHES: Donald Simmons of Roanoke earned a catch-and-release citation in the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament for an amberjack he caught at the Chesapeake Light Tower.
Richard Graves and Danny Graves of Dublin weighed a 29-pound, 6-ounce striped bass landed from Claytor Lake. The people at Lakeside Marine Supply said it was the largest striper from Claytor they've ever seen.
Joe Millehan of Franklin County caught a 27-pound striper from Smith Mountain Lake while fishing a Sutton Spoon.
Neil Moore of Roanoke landed the biggest bass, a 6-pound largemouth, in the Red Man Piedmont Division tournament on Kerr Lake. The fish earned him $1,000 in a contest that was won by Barry Bass of Sutherlin. Bass had a 12-pound, 15-ounce limit of five fish he caught in Grassy Creek on Zoom lizards and Mann's jelly worms.
by CNB