Anthony Rozniak was fishing for catfish with his brother on the Missouri River earlier this month and caught the unexpected—a 3-pound skipjack herring.
Recognizing that it could be a Missouri record, the fishermen immediately went to the St. Louis Regional office of the Missouri Department of Conservation and had the fish weighed on a certified scale.
The 3-pound skipjack herring was approved as a state record, and it tied two other catches in the pole-and-line division, the first coming in 2017 and the second recorded in 2019, both coming from the Osage River.
“We threw some jigs out to see what was there and the first fish I hooked into was a 1½-pound skipjack,” Rozniak explained to the MDC.
“The very next cast was double that size. We had only been out fishing for 15 minutes by the time I caught it. I looked at my brother and said, ‘I hate to cancel our fishing trip, but we got a state record! We got to go!’”
It was Missouri’s fifth state-record fish recorded in 2023.
“It’s funny because about five months ago, I did look through the list of state records and said to my brother, if we did break one, it would be a skipjack,” he said. “I honestly never thought it would happen, but I feel extremely lucky.”
