ROGERS, Arkansas — On June 15, a local angler celebrated entering Arkansas's record books with a whopping 127-pound, 6-ounce paddlefish on Beaver Lake.
With this catch, Garfield resident Mike Schleeper beat the previous state record of 118 pounds, caught by James Johnson in 2020.
“I’ve been fishing for stripers up here for about 13 years, and I’ve had the chance to catch some stripers over 30 pounds, but this was different,” Schleeper described. “It didn’t strip line and stop in surges like big stripers do, he just sort of pulled the rod down and kept going. I couldn’t turn him so we had to follow him with the trolling motor for about the first 20 minutes.”
He added that he was with fishing partner Tom Mayberry trolling brooder minnows when he made the lucky catch around 30 feet deep near Point 6.
“It was a 45-minute fight altogether,” Schleeper said. “I’d thought maybe it was a really big striper, but then we could finally see it a little bit. It looked like a giant catfish at first, but as we got it closer to the boat we realized what it was.”
They discovered that the paddlefish had been hooked in one of its pectoral fins while they were trolling. While snagged fish usually don’t count toward state records in many places, paddlefish are accepted since they don't bite lures.
“Our net wasn’t big enough for the fish,” Schleeper said. “Tom wrestled with that fish for a while trying to figure out a way to get it in the boat. At one point I told him to just cut the line because it wasn’t worth it. Tom was adamant that we needed to get that fish in and report it. As soon as the fish fell to the bottom of the boat, the hook popped free. We got really lucky.”
A recent regulation passed by the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission will allow a limited, permit-based snagging season for paddlefish in the White River section of Beaver Lake from the Twin Bridges Access to the Lake Sequoyah Dam from April 15 to June 15.
