Frank Yarborough of Clover caught this 4.98-pound, 19.5-inch Pacu from Lake Wylie last week.
It is believed the be the largest ever caught from Lake Wylie.
On an overdue fishing trip with his brother last week, dropping line just off from a frequented restaurant dock made all the sense in the world to Frank Yarborough. What happened next, well, he’s still scratching his head.
“It’s definitely the strangest thing I ever caught in Lake Wylie,” Yarborough said of his almost five-pound, 20-inch pacu. “We had all kinds of people looking at it, taking pictures of it, Goggling it at the boat landing.”
On Wednesday Yarborough turned 40, yet in all those years even the lifelong Clover resident never once saw a fish with “teeth like a human” pulled from Lake Wylie. Now he pulls it out of his freezer — a non-native pacu that comes from the piranha family.
State biologists measured the pacu at 4.98 pounds and 19.5 inches – the largest ever from Lake Wylie.
“That’s the biggest one we’ve seen out of Lake Wylie,” said Wes Stewart, fisheries expert with South Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
The fish was so large, in fact, that biologists told Yarborough and girlfriend Theresa Woods that they wanted to send off a sample of its brain tissue to figure out how old the fish was, and maybe even how it got that big.
“They have caught them before, but not this big,” Woods said. “They were kind of excited about it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment