February 24, 2018 - Lake Fork's golden reputation for producing big bites and giant bass is well known. As Craig Carpenter of Murphy illustrated last week, the 27,000-acre reservoir near Quitman also kicks out some bragging-size crappie on occasion.
Carpenter and his fishing partner, Kirk Grounds of Sachse, were soaking jigs and shiners around underwater stumps and treetops in the mid-lake area at about 10 a.m. on Feb. 4 when Carpenter hooked and landed what may be the biggest white crappie ever reeled in at Lake Fork and the heaviest crappie of any kind caught in Texas since 2003.
The 17 1/2 inch fish reportedly tipped the certified scales at Oak Ridge Marina to 3.55 pounds (3 pounds, 8.8 ounces). It measured 16 1/4 inches around the girth.
Carpenter says he has submitted the paperwork for review by the Texas Parks Wildlife Department's Angler Recognition Program. If approved, Carpenter's whopper crappie will easily eclipse the 3.34 pound lake record white crappie that was caught by Donna Wooldridge in December 2015.
"We fish for crappie a lot, but neither of us has ever seen anything like it," said Carpenter. "Some of the people who saw it jumped back and asked what it was when we pulled it out of the livewell. They couldn't believe it was a crappie."
Carpenter and Grounds compete in several crappie tournaments throughout the year and they finish high in the standings fairly often. That's because they have developed a knack for finding the big ones.
"Kirk does a lot of idling around and looking with his electronics," he said. "If we see a tree and there's not fish around it we don't even drop a bait. We don't necessarily look for big groups of fish, either. What we look for this time of year are stumps or treetops with just one or two fish. We believe those are usually going to be your bigger fish."
That's what the men were looking for last Sunday morning as Grounds idled around some scattered timber in 37 feet of water. When his Humminbird electronics showed a single fish suspended about 22 feet beneath the surface, both anglers dropped their baits on it. Grounds was soaking a live shiner and Carpenter was using an 1/8 ounce pink jig tipped with chartreuse/white body on a 10-foot crappie pole.
"We'd been fishing for about 3-4 minutes before she tapped my jig," he said. "That 10-foot pole loaded up pretty good and I told Kirk I had something pretty big. I thought it might be a catfish, but then we saw it roll on its side. Kirk said right away it was a new lake record."
Carpenter, a Top 10 finisher in the Lake Fork Crappiefest tournament the last two years, offered up humble theory as to the big fish chose his jig over his partner's shiner.
"In my mind, 9/10ths the credit goes to luck and the other 1/10th goes to Kirk," he said. "He's a guru with electronics. I just ride in the back and fish. I was just lucky on the pole that day."
Carpenter said he decided to retain the fish instead of releasing it, just in case there were any questions about the authenticity of the catch down the road. He is having the fish mounted to preserve the memory.
