A Maryland fisherman set a new yellow perch record earlier this month with a 2.3-pound, 16-inch fish caught on the Susquehanna River. Thomas Dembeck caught the big perch in 50-feet of water, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) reports, de-throning a state record that's been on the books since 1979.
Dembeck told MDNR he's been perch fishing since the 1960s and has always wanted to catch a state-record. He'd been reeling in small perch all day on February 7, and when the big fish hit, he thought he had two smaller perch on the line at once.
“I was nonchalantly reeling the fish towards the surface and even took time to watch an eagle fly by,” Dembeck recounted in an MDNR interview about the record-breaking catch. When the fish approached the surface, he yelled for his fishing buddy Lee Haile to grab the net.
Haile is the current Maryland state-record holder for chain pickerel, and he had a feeling that Dembeck's yellow perch was a contender for a record its own. "The fish was weighed on a certified scale at Gibby’s Seafood in Lutherville, and the species was confirmed by DNR recreational fisheries coordinator Erik Zlokovitz," MDNR wrote in a press release issued on Feb. 11. "Dembeck’s catch bested the long-standing record of 2.2 pounds, caught by Niles Pethel on November 21, 1979."
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Dembeck was fishing two 1-inch plastic paddletails on 1/8-inch jig heads above a hefty 1-ounce sinker, and his light spinning setup was spooled with 10-pound braided line, according to MDNR. While his perch is the biggest ever recorded in the Chesapeake Division, it's not the biggest ever caught in Delaware. That distinction belongs to a 3.3-pounder caught in a Hartford County farm pond in 2006 by angler Phillip Deere IV.
