Virginia Angler Lands World Record Fallfish with Just Two Casts

Sometimes all it takes to land a trophy is a single cast into the right spot…

Any angler who has fished the East Coast’s rivers, streams, and creeks will certainly be familiar with the fallfish, a native fish species in the chub family, Cyprinidae. They’re a common bycatch when throwing just about anything on a fly rod, and more often than not, they eat flies with more aggression than a trout.

Recently, Virginia angler, Josh Dolin managed to get his hands on not one, but two world record fallfish in as many casts. Now Josh is no stranger to breaking records as he works toward his goal of catching a trophy-sized catch in all 30 Virginia game fish species. While Josh was trying to tick the fallfish off his list, magic happened…

 

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“I made one cast and nothing,” Dolin says. “I was retrieving it with a twitch and a pause. On my second cast I paused and the fish ate it as the spoon fluttered. It fought like a fish three times its size, and I thought I had a monster brown trout on. I got it to shore after it took me into some trees and fought it for a couple of minutes. The state record was 3 pounds 5 ounces, I put it on my certified spring scale, and it immediately went to 3.5 pounds, so I knew I had a potential state record.”

As it turns out, Josh’s fish weighed 3 pounds and 9.5 ounces on the official scale, beating the current world record by half an ounce.

“To beat a world record, it has to be 2 ounces over the existing world record, so it will tie the existing world record,” Dolin said. “It leaves me some room because I only made two casts, and I know there’s a bigger one in there.”

You can read more about Josh’s world record in this article from Outdoor Life!