After a slew of young-and-lucky anglers and the recent Crowder fishing license scandal, it is nice to see a pending record caught by an angler who is truly worthy of it. After a ton of hard work, Jim Zimmerman from Wisconsin hooked a potential state-record walleye at 15.08 pounds from the Pecatonica River in Illinois.
From this story on suntimes.com:
P_ending completion of paperwork and verification, Jim Zimmerman appears to have caught the Illinois-record walleye of 15.08 pounds from the Pecatonica River.
Zimmerman was pitching a 1/8th-ounce Northland fireball jig with a 3-inch Berkley PowerBait twister tail and a small minnow when he caught his 31.5-inch walleye with a girth of 20 3/8th inches.
“This guy fishes more than anybody I know,” said Dan Palmer, a well-known tournament organizer from the Rockford area. “He has put in at least two months of 12 hours a day [on the Pec and the Rock rivers]. Last year he caught one that would have been a record, but it lost 10 percent of its weight in the freezer._
“There is not a more deserving guy to have the record. He puts the time in.”
Let’s hope, for his sake, that he actually had his fishing license…