It was round noon on March 19 when Xuan Qi and his 11-year-old son, Brian, launched their Tracker bass boat on Stillhouse Hole Lake. The 2 have been fishing on the higher finish of the reservoir, which covers 6,400 acres in east-central Texas. Utilizing an electrical motor, they have been slowly trolling for white bass and crappies. Someday round 2 p.m. a heavy fish hit Brian’s small white swimbait.
“Brian has been fishing since age 5 and loves it,” Xuan tells Outside Life. “He is aware of a very good fish when it hits his lure. So, I finished trolling whereas he fought the fish. Quickly he introduced it to the boat, and I netted it and introduced it in.”
Xuan says it was the largest black crappie that both of them had ever caught from the lake. Pondering it may very well be a lake file, they appeared on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Division web site and noticed that the youth crappie file for Stillhouse Hole was a ten.88-inch fish weighing lower than a pound.
Xuan knew his son’s fish was greater than that. So, he contacted Bob Maindelle, a neighborhood information who runs Holding the Line Information Service, and he requested him what steps they wanted to take to submit a possible file.
Maindelle, who operates an official TPWD weigh station out of his storage, was completely happy to assist the 2 fishermen. Assembly them at house, he first verified the species as a black crappie. Then, along with his spouse there as a witness, Maindelle measured the fish at 15 inches lengthy and put it on his licensed scale, which registered 1.75 kilos.
To finish the method, Maindelle helped the Qis navigate TPWD’s web site and submit an internet file utility. Though the applying remains to be pending, Brian’s fish ought to simply exchange the present junior waterbody file.
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Xuan says that after ending that course of, they went proper again to trolling and filling their cooler.
“We caught a complete of eighteen crappies and a pair white bass,” Xuan says. “We filleted and ate all of them.”
