On a trip to the Pueblo Reservoir in November 2023, Westcliffe resident and avid angler Pam Mitzner was on a boat with a rod in her hand, fishing for crappie deep in the lake when she felt a lunker on the line.
Mitzner said it didn’t take long for her to realize it was a “pretty good-sized fish.”
Her husband, Mike Mitzner, had caught a colossal crappie of his own the day prior — the couple tends to be pretty competitive about their fishing exploits, and Mike maintains his crappie was bigger than Pam’s catch the day after — so they’d already looked up the Colorado record length for a crappie.
So when Pam caught her crappie the next day, they quickly confirmed the fish she’d caught was not only large but a new state record of 15.75 inches.
“It was obvious that it was a nice crappie because we catch lots to keep … and to harvest (a crappie) in the reservoir, they have to be 10 inches or greater. So for it to be, you know, half-again bigger, we knew it was a pretty good-sized fish,” Mitzner said.