The fish might’ve cost him one his best bass rods, but Charlie Conway says the spotted gar he caught in Lake Texoma on Oct. 10 was worth the trade. Conway’s 10-plus-pound gar was certified as a new Oklahoma record Tuesday, beating out the previous record by more than three pounds, according to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.
Conway lives in Kingston not far from Texoma, a large reservoir on the Red River that spans the Texas-Oklahoma border. He grew up fishing the lake and says his state-record gar was even more memorable because of where he caught it.
“I’ve fished that spot since I was little bitty — probably about four,” Conway says of a particular cove. “My dad used to take me there and fish all the time.”
He’d gotten the day off work Friday, so he headed down to the lake to fish alone. Conway was looking for bass, and he focused on the shorelines around the cove, where shad were still plentiful thanks to a good spawn this spring. He says some docks there had moved around during a recent windstorm, which also made the water a little dirtier than usual.
Using an Abu Garcia Vendetta rod paired with a Quantum reel, he cast out a blade bait. Just 10 minutes into his day, the big spotted gar was the first fish he hooked.
“I felt a bump and set the hook, and my rod didn’t move at all. I thought I’d snagged a piece of trash or something,” Conway tells Outdoor Life. “Then it started swimming.”
He fought the fish for a bit, and when it jumped in the air, it snapped the rod tip. Conway still had plenty of leverage with his shorter stick, so he pulled the fish up onto the bank. He first thought it was a smaller alligator gar, but quickly realized it was either a spotted gar or a shortnose gar. Either way it was a trophy fish, and he called up his buddy, who told him to contact ODWC and have a biologist come out to weigh it.
“I’ve shot a bunch of gar bowfishing … and [most of them] are fairly easy to tell apart by their head shape. But the spotted gar and shortnose, they can be really hard to tell apart,” Conway explains. “And that’s what I told the biologist. I was like, ‘I’m not exactly sure which it is,’ but it would have beat the state record for either one. The shortnose record was around seven pounds, too.”
After confirming the species as a spotted gar by noting the spots on its tail, which are absent on shortnose gar, the biologist measured the fish at 37 inches long. Conway says the gar’s girth was a little over 13 inches, and it weighed 10 pounds 8.96 ounces.
This puts the fish in world-record territory as well. Although search engines list the “world record spotted gar” as a 10-pound 9-ounce fish caught in Missouri in 2021, that Missouri fish has not been recognized by the International Game Fish Association, the organization that maintains fishing world records. According to the IGFA, the all-tackle world record spotted gar came from Lake Mexia in Texas and weighed 9 pounds 12 ounces.
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It’s unclear if Conway will try to certify his Oklahoma record with the IGFA, but he kept the fish and says he’ll have a full body mount made. The fisheries biologist who certified the record also plans to get the gar’s otolith from the taxidermist so he can age the fish. (Although they don’t live nearly as long as their giant relatives, alligator gar, spotted gar are still a long-lived and prehistoric species.) Conway says he’s keeping the broken rod, too.
“Yeah. That’s probably gonna go up on the wall with the blade bait beside the mount. [That way] it’ll be up there alongside the last fish it caught.”
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