It’s official: A 15-year-old girl who caught a 101.11-pound blue catfish has become the new Ohio state record holder for the species.
“I started crying,” teen Jaylynn Parker told Fox News Digital. “My mom started crying, too. We’re just super excited.”
“I’m very proud of myself that I did that,” she added.
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“I still haven’t fully comprehended that I’m now the state record holder.”
Parker of New Richmond caught the blue catfish on April 7 on Twelve Mile Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River.
The fish was legally caught on a jug line.
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“He was bigger than we ever imagined,” Parker, a sophomore at New Richmond High School, told Fox News Digital one week after the catch.
Parker and her family put out jug lines around 8:00 p.m. the evening before the big catch.
When they went back the next day, this time with family friend Jeff Sam, the whopper was on the second line they checked.
“I started pulling on him and I noticed that he was pulling back pretty hard,” Parker said.
“I was thinking, ‘This is a pretty good fish.’”
The fish was wrapped up in some debris caused by the river being high, Parker said. Attempts to net the fish nearly flipped the boat, she added.
“The fish pulled again real hard and started fighting,” she said.
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“I think at that point the adrenaline was really going. I just wanted to get him up because I knew he was a really big fish, and I was kind of scared he was going to get away.”
Parker gave the fish one good pull, and it rolled over to his side, she said.
“I started screaming, and I was yelling, ‘Net the fish, net the fish,'” Parker said.
Because the river was high that day, they were able to get the fish onto the dock with the help of Parker’s parents, Chuck and Kristin Parker, and Sam’s son, as Fox News Digital previously reported.
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“They all grabbed the net and pulled him up onto the dock,” she said.
“They were like, ‘This is a really big fish. I think this might be a state record fish.’”
Parker was eager to weigh the fish, but realized she and the others had forgotten to bring their scale.
There was no one around them who had a scale either, so they called the Ohio Division of Wildlife.
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“It was Sunday and the game wardens came out after about an hour,” Parker said.
“We needed to have it weighed on an auditor’s scale in order to be certified, but nothing was open that had an auditor scale.”
The adventure continued until Parker could confirm her potentially state award-winning catfish.
“The game wardens told us that we [could] bring him to our house,” she said.
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“We have a big tank, so we put him in there for the night until we could get to Bethel Feed and Supply the next morning to weigh him. He stayed in the bait tank all night and my dad was out there every hour checking on him. He went on some adventures.”
When the family was finally able to weigh the catch, the scales tipped at more than 100 pounds.
The new record was certified on April 27 by a vote of the Outdoor Writers of Ohio (OWO) members present at the organization’s annual business meeting at Shawnee State Park lodge, according to a statement obtained by Fox News Digital.
Sixteen OWO members voted on the certification of the new record.
The vote was 11-5 in favor of certifying Parker’s catch.
Fox News Digital requested but has not yet received a response from the OWO in regard to why the record was put to a vote.
After the weigh-in, Parker was anxious to release the fish back into his home waters.
“It made me so happy to see him swim away knowing that we took very good care of him and that we released him very, very healthy,” Parker said once the fish was back in its natural habitat.
“And it just made me super happy to know that we were able to keep him alive and release him where he was caught and where he knows he’s from.”
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Parker said she received a letter from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, congratulating her on being the new state record holder.
She said she hopes to become a role model to other girls.
“I’ve definitely had people reaching out to us saying that their daughters want to go fishing with me and that they look up to me,” Parker said.
“People think fishing is a guy’s sport, that girls can’t do this, but, obviously, they can because I just did it — and I did it better,” she added.
The previous record for the state’s largest blue catfish caught was 96 pounds, also caught in the Ohio River, by Chris Rolph in 2009.
Meanwhile, the world record is a 143-pound blue catfish measuring almost 57 inches which was caught at John H. Kerr-Buggs Island Lake near Clarksville, Virginia.
The OWO maintains Ohio’s record fish list in consultation with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife.
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