Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, my dad kept a fish scale hanging in the corner of our barn. Let’s say he went fishing and came home with a nice bass, a three pounder. Before he cleaned and dressed it, he would weigh it on the scale. Then when he told some of his fishing buddies about the fish, he could tell them exactly what it weighed. I think fishermen like to talk about things like that.
But today I would like to tell you about the biggest fish he ever weighed on that scale, and it came right out of Mill Creek. I was with him the day he caught it.
The two of us were fishing for catfish, a bit upstream from Amrine Cemetery. My dad was fishing with a lightweight split bamboo fly rod. He had bought some dough balls for our bait. He said that catfish loved them.
The two of us baited our hooks and began fishing maybe 10 yards apart. There was no activity at all for the first half hour or so. We just sat there and talked in the shade along the creek bank.
Then my dad got a bite. He knew immediately that it was not a catfish because once he set the hook, the fish did not head for deeper water. It just went right to the bottom. He knew he had hooked a carp. But this wasn’t an average carp. It was a “monster” carp.
My dad battled the fish with that flimsy fly rod for close to an hour. He tried to get it close enough to the surface so he could get a hand in one of its gills and lift it out of the water. When he finally did that, I couldn’t believe how big it was.
He usually didn’t take a carp home, because they weren’t good to eat, but he took this one home to weigh it. As soon as we got home, he had that fish on his scale, and it weighed in at a bit over 21 pounds. It was the biggest fish I had ever seen.
Word of the big fish traveled fast, and our barn was soon crawling with kids. Then neighborhood adults came to see it. Even the elderly Robb sisters, Lena and Lillian, were in awe of it. And before long, people were coming in from all over town.
I think that was probably the biggest fish ever taken out of Mill Creek. If you know of a bigger one, I’d like to hear from you.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com