ST. LOUIS — A fisherman on the Lake of the Ozarks brought ashore a world-record paddlefish March 17 that weighed more than 164 pounds — the biggest paddlefish ever caught and the largest fish of any kind in Missouri’s record books.
Chad Williams, of Olathe, Kan., hooked the monster fish around 8:30 a.m., on an outing chartered by Smith’s Fishing Adventures, based out of Warsaw.
“As soon as it hit the boat, everybody’s jaws dropped,” said Jason Smith, who runs Smith’s Fishing Adventures. “It was an epic day for all of us.”
The fish measured just over 62 inches from its eye to the fork of its tail and was caught in a roughly 10-minute tussle, said Smith, the boat captain — who called state officials to tell them about the catch. After coming ashore, the fish was weighed on a certified scale at a butcher shop in the town of Montreal, where Missouri Department of Conservation personnel met the group from the boat.
“I could not believe my eyes when I actually saw it person,” said Samantha Clary, a fisheries biologist from MDC, who was there.
Paddlefish are aquatic oddities in the modern age, unlike any other fish that’s still swimming — ancient relics that are considered a “living dinosaur” of the fish world, said Andrew Branson, a fisheries programs specialist for MDC. They look almost like swordfish at the front, with a long, protruding, paddle-shaped rostrum. And like sharks, they consist largely of cartilage and are covered in scale-less skin except for an area near the tail.
They are found throughout regional stretches of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as their tributaries, and have earned recognition as Missouri’s “official state aquatic animal.” (They are not, however, Missouri’s state fish — a distinction that belongs to the channel catfish.)
In Missouri’s records, the enormous specimen blew any competition out of the water — coming in 24 pounds heavier than any other recorded fish in state history. The previous record was a 140-pound paddlefish caught in 2022. And those top paddlefish have tipped the scales more than other fish caught in the state. For comparison, a Florissant man landed the largest blue catfish in Missouri’s history, at 130 pounds — which was a world record at the time it was caught in 2010.
Paddlefish, also called spoonbills, are prized for their size, uniqueness and even black-market caviar. They’re “filter-feeder” fish that primarily eat plankton, so they are not caught through traditional fishing methods with bait or lures. Instead, the fish are caught through snagging, when fishermen pull hooks through the water to snare them.
MDC said it was Williams’ first snagging trip when he hauled in the record fish. Williams could not be reached for comment Monday.
Williams’ catch holds the record for the world’s biggest paddlefish ever caught, surpassing one from Oklahoma by 13 ounces, according to MDC. And it dwarfed the paddlefish that Smith is accustomed to. Before Sunday, he said the biggest one he’d boated was 108 pounds, with keepers typically weighing between 40 and 70 pounds.
