Jakob Mackey was fishing his neighborhood lake in Sioux City, Iowa last August when an enormous grass carp jerked his rod off the shore and into the water. Mackey had been targeting big carp in Bacon Creek Lake all summer, but he never expected to hook one weighing north of 70 pounds, the angler tells F&S. Earlier this month, the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) certified Mackey’s grass carp as a new World Record for the 30-pound line class category.
Mackey says he’s been obsessed with carp fishing ever since spotting a group of the behemoths in the shallows at Bacon Creek Lake back in 2024. “They were like 4-and-a-half to five-feet long, just sitting right in front of me, and I could see them clearly through my polarized lenses,” he recalls. “I did a ton of research on European carp techniques and ordered a bunch of their tackle through an outfitter down in Texas.”
Through his research, Mackey discovered a specialized carp-fishing setup known as the Hair Rig. It was developed in the 1970s by anglers targeting highly pressured carp in the English countryside. “It’s not well known in the U.S.,” he says. “It’s similar to a catfish setup, but your bait isn’t on the hook. It uses a pack bait [or chum] setup on an extension of line just off the hook.”
Mackey had a 6- and a 15-foot rod rigged with the setup on the morning of August 10 when the record-breaking carp hit. “The 15-foot rod flew off the bank when the carp struck,” he says. “Luckily, the mud kept her from pulling it out into the middle of the lake. When I ran out in my waders and picked the rod up, the fish was running like a freight train.”
The carp peeled line from Mackey’s Penn reel for 15 minutes before he could finally reach it with his 42-inch carbon fiber net, a special carp net he ordered from Spain. By then, a crowd of joggers had gathered on the shore to watch him fight the fish, Mackey remembers. “When I got her in the net, she immediately snapped one of the arms off like a twig,” he says. “Luckily, I was holding onto the unbroken end and was still able to get her to shore.”
With third-party witnesses present, Mackey weighed the fish in at a whopping 71 pounds, 8 ounces. From tip to tail, it measured over 46 inches long. According to IGFA records, it outweighed the previous 30-pound line class world record—caught in Saitama, Japan—by more than 16 pounds.
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