The morning of March 5 was a good one for Silas Turner, who’d been guiding a pair of crappie anglers on Georgia’s Lake Blackshear. Turner returned to the dock around midday and dropped off his happy clients, leaving him plenty of time to do some fishing himself.
“I decided to try that early afternoon for largemouth bass,” Turner, the co-owner of C&S Guide Service, tells Outdoor Life. “I was just fun fishing alone in the middle of a creek on the lake’s east side. Using sonar, I spotted a big fish about six feet down in seventeen feet of water and cast a half-ounce bass jig to it.”
Turner saw the fish take his lure and thought it was a nice largemouth at first. He realized pretty quickly, though, that it was something bigger than a bass.
“I thought for a good while that it was a big catfish — until I saw it roll on the surface,” Turner says. “I knew right away that it was a big gar, because I bowfish for them and I’ve seen some good ones.”
Turner fought the fish for about 20 minutes, using a 7-foot 3-inch baitcasting set up. Although his reel was spooled with 50-pound braided main line, he played the toothy fish carefully.
“I had a 20-pound fluorocarbon leader on my braided line. But I got lucky because my jig hooked it at the tip of its snout, so the leader didn’t fray in its mouth.”
The gar wouldn’t fit in Turner’s net, so he grabbed the fish with one hand behind its gills and another around its body. Then he lifted it into his boat and onto the deck. Using the Bubba scale he had onboard, he weighed the fish at 33.44 pounds.
“I knew it was a giant, so I called my bowhunting buddy David Campbell and asked him what the state record was.”
Campbell told him the Georgia record for longnose gar weighhed 31 pounds 2 ounces. That fish was caught from the Coosa River in 2022 by Rachel Harrison, who’d been targeting white bass with light tackle.
Turner then contacted the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Officials told him the quickest way to get an official weight would be to take it to the DNR fish hatchery in Cordele. It took about two hours for Turner to get there, and he thinks it lost a bit of weight during transport.
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At the hatchery Turner met Matt Butzin and Angela Spinks, who weighed his fish on certified scales at 31 pounds 14.4 ounces. He taped out at 59.875 inches.
“I’m sure it lost some weight, but he was still big enough for a state record.”
Turner says he was just notified by the Georgia DNR that his longnose gar has been officially recognized as a new state record. The record fish is currently in a freezer, and eventually destined for the taxidermist.
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