A Wisconsin angler recently crushed the state’s longstanding benchmark for smallmouth bass. Austin Schiefer caught the near 10-pound smallie while fishing in the deep waters of Green Bay with a 5-inch soft jerkbait, he tells Field & Stream. The fish dethroned a Wisconsin state record that has stood for three quarters of a century.
Schiefer was fishing from a boat with his friend Ted Johnson when he hooked into the enormous smallmouth. They’d been catching smallies on tubes all day, he says, when they decided to switch up baits. “Ted told me to come up to the front of the boat to get in on the action,” he recalls. “I switched to a stouter rod with a jerk bait rigged to a minnow-head jig and made an 80-foot cast.”
Through the live scope, Schiefer watched a giant blob come off the bottom and follow his bait for 30 or 40 feet, he says. Then the blob engulfed his bait. “When I set the hook I thought is was a big drum because it was rolling on the bottom,” he says. “Then as it got a little closer, it started fighting more like a smallmouth—shaking its head and taking drag.”
The giant smallmouth circled the boat then hesitated on the port side before Johnson netted it on his first try. “Once we got it in the boat we both guessed that it was easily over 7 pounds,” he says. “But the more I looked at it, the more shocked I was.”
On the digital scale inside the boat, the fish registered an astonishing 9.6 pounds. “That’s when I knew I had a state record,” Schiefer recalls, “and I started calling the DNR.”
Back at the boat ramp, Schiefer took the fish to a local bait shop. The employees there directed him to a nearby grocery store with a certified scale where the fish was weighed in again at 9.72 pounds or 9 pounds, 11.5 ounces.
“I was in shock after that, and I’m still in shock,” Schiefer says. “I borrowed a cooler from my grandpa, who lives in the area, so we could keep it over night. Then I met up with two guys from Wisconsin DNR the next morning to make it all official.”
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The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved and certified Schiefer’s smallmouth as the new state record on November 3. It beat the previous Wisconsin record, caught by Leon Stefonek in 1950, by more than 10 ounces. The IGFA all-tackle world record for smallmouth stands at 11 pounds, 15 ounces. David Hayes caught that legendary fish in July 1955 in Tennessee’s Dale Hollow Lake.
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