Jerry Porter and pals Ron and Rodney Shelton were having a banner morning of spring-spawning crappie action on 1,000-acre East Lynn Lake on May 6. It was only 9 a.m. when Porter hooked a fish bigger than the others.
“The crappies were bedding and hit everything we cast to them around a fallen oak tree,” Jerry Porter, 50, tells Outdoor Life. “Every cast we hooked a fish. Then I stuck one that was different — bigger than all the others, and I panicked.”
Porter yelled for help and a buddy grabbed a net and scooped the fish into the 17-foot Bass Tracker boat, which belongs to Porter’s son.
The men released most of the crappies they caught that day, but Porter put his big fish in the live well. Then they went back to catching crappies.
“We fished until four that afternoon because the action was incredible,” says Porter, a retired state highway department employee from Harts. “I know we caught 300 crappies that day before we headed in.”
At the boat launch Porter ran into another pal, Jamie Mullins, who looked at his big crappie and told Porter it was likely a state record and he should report it to West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources.
“DNR was closed for the day, so I took the crappie home and put it in water until the next day when state offices were open.”
The following morning, he drove into town where DNR fisheries biologist Jake Whalen weighed and measured the live crappie. It weighed 3.6 pounds, and was 17.7 inches long, making it a new state weight record for a black crappie.
The previous West Virginia black crappie record for weight was a 3.15-pounder, caught by Dwight Priestly from Woodrum Lake just last year. Priestly’s fish was 17.76 inches long and still maintains the state length record for the species. Porter used a Berkley 7-foot spinning rod outfit, 6-pound test, and a 1/16-ounce pink jig tipped with a minnow to catch his 3.6-pound record fish.
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Porter says he’s caught at least four other crappies longer than 17 inches from East Lynn Lake over the years he’s fished it.
“The lake is jammed with 7- to 9-inch crappies, and we need to keep more of them to keep from overpopulating the lake,” says Porter, who plans to have the fish mounted by a taxidermist. “There are some big ones, but they have to compete for food with all the little fellows.
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