Logan Kuhrmann and his buddy Victor Auriemma took advantage of a day off work on June 4 and went fishing in northern Chesapeake Bay. Both anglers are bass fanatics, and they weren’t even thinking about carp fishing that Saturday morning when they launched Auriemma’s 20-foot boat and headed straight for the Susquehanna Flats.
When they arrived at one of their favorite spots, though, there were carp all over the place, and Kuhrmann ended up hooking and landing one of them on a soft plastic worm. The common carp weighed a whopping 49-pounds, and the fish has since been verified by the Maryland Department of Resources as a new state record, replacing the previous record that stood for 44 years.
“There were a lot of carp spawning in that area, we could see them boiling the water as we bass fished,” Kuhrmann told the Maryland DNR. “I fish there several times every week for bass, and the carp were really on that flat in about four feet of water.”
Kuhrmann explained that even with all those carp milling around, he kept his sights set on a big largemouth. He was using a spinning rod rigged with a black-and-blue Berkley Power Worm when he got a hit, set the hook, and felt a heavy fish on the line.
The fish dove deep for four or five minutes, Kuhrmann said, which made him think it was probably a catfish. But when the massive head of an oversize common carp rolled on the surface, he landed the fish in short order and stuck it in the live well.
The two anglers took the fish to Herb’s Tackle Shop, where it was officially weighed on a certified scale by one of the shop’s co-owners, Mike Benjamin.
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“We’ve been here since 1964 and it’s the biggest carp any of us have seen,” Benjamin said of Kuhrmann’s catch. “It measured 39-inches long, with a 32.5-inch girth. Just a massive fish.”
The 49-pounder crushes the previous state record for common carp by almost five pounds. That fish was caught back in 1978 by angler Jim Lake near Morgantown Beach.
“We’ve seen some really big ones up in the flats but we’ve never seen one this big ever,” Kuhrmann said. “The bass fishing wasn’t great, but this made my week.”