Joe Dahl is what you might call a rough fish enthusiast. Born and raised in Minnesota, Dahl’s been fishing all his life, but in recent years, he’s branched out from walleyes and bass to target more non-traditional species like bowfin, alligator gar, and bigmouth buffalo, a native sucker fish that looks like a carp and pulls like an ox.
In late April, the Minneapolis-based angler broke the state catch-and-release record with a 32.5-inch bigmouth buffalo he caught from a bridge over the Cannon River. Dahl’s record buffalo was certified by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources on May 26.
“I’ve just always been intrigued by them,” Dahl tells Outdoor Life, referring to the family that includes smallmouth, bigmouth, and black buffalo. “A few years ago I was with a buddy that guides down in Texas, and I caught a black buffalo that was 34 pounds, just shy of the state record. So, that was freaking huge, and I made it a goal back then — this was around 2022 — to catch a large specimen of each buffalo species.”
After going back to Texas in 2024 and landing a 30-pound smallmouth buffalo, Dahl says his attention shifted back to his home waters in the Minneapolis suburbs, where bigmouth buffalo tend to congregate in large numbers each spring. The DNR had also added the species to its list of potential catch-and-release records last year. (Unlike traditional fishing records, which are determined by weight, catch-and-release records are verified through photographs and length measurements.) Dahl knew exactly where he’d go to chase a new record.
Over the course of several days this April, Dahl fished a deep tailrace of the Cannon River just below a dam. The spot isn’t far from where he lives in the Minneapolis suburbs, and he says the buffalo tend to change their habits that time of year, making them much easier to target. They’re filter feeders, similar to Asian carp, and they mainly eat plankton and other microorganisms. During the spring months, though, they’ll act more aggressively as they stage in the current to spawn.
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“I’ve never caught a bigmouth buffalo any other way. I know people catch them using traditional carp tactics, it’s just rare,” says Dahl, whose go-to rig is a curly tail soft plastic rigged on a ⅜-ounce jighead. “But underneath dams in the spring time, there’s this window of opportunity where they’ll hit lures, and you can catch them on jigs and other artificials.”
The spot itself isn’t easy to fish from, Dahl explains. It’s a large pedestrian bridge over the river, and the only way to actually land a sizable fish is with heavy tackle, a tight drag, and a drop net, which has to be lowered down to the water and then hoisted back up to the fisherman’s level. The heavy current coming out of the dam, which flows even stronger during the spring months, also makes playing fish a challenge.
“There’s just a lot of variables that come into play when you have that heavy current, a bridge, and a big fish hooked on a small jig,” Dahl says. “A lot of the time you’re just trying to cinch down your drag and get that fish to stay underneath you, because if it takes off downriver and goes under the bridge, it’s lost.”
Because he was using 50-pound braid, Dahl says he had more fish bend out his hooks than break him off. He thinks he lost around 20 to 30 big buffalo over the course of multiple days before he finally landed the record-breaker, a 32.5-inch bigmouth that he estimates weighed around 25 to 30 pounds.
Dahl’s state-record buffalo was likely an older fish as well. Bigmouth buffalo are some of the longest-lived fish in freshwater, and a recent study found that some of the larger specimens can surpass 100 years of age. The only way to age a fish is by examining its otolith, and since Dahl released his fish into the river after measuring and photographing it, there’s no way to know for sure how old it was.
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