Reported First By The Tennessean: At this time last year, Barry Parker didn’t even know that tilapia, fish native to Africa that are typically found in warmer climates, were in Old Hickory Lake.
Today the Lafayette resident owns the record for the largest tilapia caught in the state.
After hearing last spring that tilapia had been found in Old Hickory, particularly near the Gallatin Steam Plant, since 2010, Parker and his wife, Phyllis, started fishing for them a couple of weeks before Christmas.
They caught 35 the first time they went and made five more trips over the next two weeks, catching big stringers each time.
Then two days after Christmas Day, the Parkers headed back to the steam plant area where the tilapia started gobbling up the night crawlers the couple was using as bait.
After about an hour on the water, Barry, 53, hooked a fish that he wasn’t sure was a tilapia. It tugged harder on his line, diving deep and bending his rod more than any of the hundreds of tilapia he had caught to that point.
“It felt like it was something else,” Parker said. “I didn’t know if it was a different kind of fish or what. He put up a lot more fight than those others.”
Parker said he fought the fish for about 15 minutes before finally getting it to the side of his boat where Phyllis was able to scoop it up with a net.
“If it hadn’t been for (Phyllis) that day with the landing net, I probably never would have got him in the boat,” Parker said.
The fish turned out to be a tilapia, but not like any Parker ever had caught. In fact, it wasn’t like any tilapia that ever had been caught before in the state.
It weighed 6 pounds, 5.5 ounces and measured 22.5 inches. The previous record tilapia also was caught in Old Hickory and weighed 4 pounds, 14 ounces.
The post They Grow them Big In Tennessee: State Record Tilapia Caught appeared first on ODU Magazine-North America's #1 Digital Fishing Magazine.
