Hybrid striper caught on crankbait barely breaks record in Ohio

Southeast Ohio’s Muskingum River flows deep and mostly clear near its confluence with the Ohio River. Keith Snider, 48, has fished this stretch of the Muskingum most of his life, and around noon on April 22, the local farmer took to the river to fish below a small dam near the town of Lowell.

“I live on the banks of the Ohio River and regularly fish in the Muskingum because I’m building a cabin there just 12 miles from my house,” Snider said. Living outside. “I took a break from building our cabin and went to the river with my wife Nancy and friend Brian Mofett.”

Before casting a line, Snider climbed onto a concrete wall near the dam so he could survey the scene.

“I saw a back eddy with shad [baitfish] hold there,” he says. “I saw something blow up and eat the shad, so I threw a fire tiger-colored Rat-L-Trap.”

Snider got a hit on his second cast when he worked the lipless crankbait through the eddy, but he lost the fish immediately. On his fourth cast he saw a huge bass come up to the lure and turn it on.

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“I’ve caught a lot of big hybrid stripers up to 12 pounds,” says Snider, “but the fish I saw and hooked was much bigger than anything I’d caught before.”

The hybrid bass (a cross between a white bass and a striped bass) rushed to open water and pulled 100 yards of line from the reel. The bass swam quickly to a nearby river island. Fortunately, Snider used a heavy rod and reel, which allowed him to press down on the fish.

“I put my thumb on the reel spool to stop it. I wanted to stop the flight, break the line or pull out the hooks,” he says. “Luckily the fish stopped just 5 meters before I got around the island and I fought it back to shore. Then he took off for a second run, about as far and fast as the first run.”

Finally, after about twenty minutes, the fish was so tired that Snider was able to work it back to shore. But as he stood on the concrete wall and fought the fish, he began to wonder how he would ever land it. The large eddy below the dam was covered in floating debris and fallen trees.

Then his friend Moffet showed up.

“He told me to bring it in and he would use a rake to pull out the snags so we could land it,” Snider says. “Coming down from the wall while holding the rod and working it around snags was tough. But Brian finally grabbed the hybrid with both hands and snatched it out of the water. He shouted, ‘Oh my god, it’s a super big fish’.”

Snider says he thought about releasing the fish after taking a few photos. But his companions asked him to keep it instead.

“They said not to do that [release it] because they had never seen a hybrid of that size.”

Snider weighed the fish on two hand scales, with one registering just under 22 pounds. He then reluctantly slipped the fish onto a stringer and dropped it back into the water before casting again with his Rat-L-Trap. He says he was dealt another vicious blow in the same vortex, but the hooks pulled away before he could see what it was.

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When it was time to leave, Snider loaded the hybrid bass into a garbage bag and then drove his truck to his cabin. The fish was still on the stringer when he got there, and he left it in his pond overnight. The next morning the bass was still alive, but barely.

“There were a few large gizzard shad floating on the surface near the hybrid that he probably regurgitated,” says Snider, “because I don’t have any gizzard shad in my pond.”

He then placed the whole fish in a freezer. And the hybrid bass probably would have stayed there, if not for his friend Moffet, who came along and told him the bass could be a new state record.

Two days after catching the fish, Snider called the Ohio DNR office and then took the hybrid striper to a UPS to use their certified scale. He photographed the entire process and achieved an official weight of 18.82 pounds, beating the existing Ohio record by just 5 ounces. The fish was 32 inches long and 25 inches in girth, and DNR biologists confirmed it was a hybrid striper that was about 7 years old.

Snider says he is convinced the fish weighed more when he caught it. He expects he lost some weight when he vomited the shad, and thinks he lost a few more ounces while it was in the freezer. Either way, he’ll get more than one replica mount made of his state record fish.

“I will have one for my house and one for my cabin. Nancy was emphatic about that,” says Snider. “She’s the one who wants me to be outside, fishing and relaxing from work. She’s the reason I was there that day and hooked that hybrid.”