Dwayne Hosea lands 17-inch, 3.48-pound slab with 15 ¾-inch girth
If this all looks very familiar, you’re not seeing double or reading the same story twice: The Hosea brothers — identical twins — are rewriting the white crappie record books for both Poverty Point Reservoir State Park and the state of Louisiana.
Less than a week after his twin brother Twayne landed a 3.52-pound slab that ranked as Poverty Point’s largest-ever sac-a-lait and Louisiana’s pending No. 2 fish, Dwayne Hosea followed that up Wednesday evening with a 3.48 pounder — the second-biggest ever landed at the lake north of Delhi and the potential No. 3-ranked white crappie in the state.
“I couldn’t quite beat my brother, but I got close,” Dwayne Hosea, 68, said with a laugh. “My brother wasn’t fishing far from me. When I pulled him up, I said, ‘Hey, he’s a 3-pounder.’”
Hosea was fishing the identical setup his brother used last week when yet another giant crappie hit about 6:30 Wednesday evening: a 1-inch bluegrass Bobby Garland Baby Shad jig on a ⅛-ounce jighead in about 3 ½ to 4 feet of water.
“It was the same area and the same location,” said Hosea, who lives a mile down the road from his brother in Delhi. “Everything was identical to his, down to the red jighead with a gold hook.”
The men were fishing in a spot locals refer to as “the hump off the graveyard,” and Hosea said he knew the fish was special when it bit.
“I tried to reach for my net and it was hung on the tie-down on my boat, so I had to thumb him,” Hosea said. “I got down close to the water and just thumbed him in.”
The brothers brought the big fish to the Poverty Point State Park Marina, where Ranger Tim Colvin weighed it in on certified scales Wednesday evening. The 3.48-pounder measured 17 inches long, with a 15 ¾-inch girth.
Dwayne Hosea said from what he saw Wednesday, the spawn at Poverty Point is about to seriously crank up.
“We saw more fish caught this afternoon within 4 or 5 feet of the bank, some 2 feet away,” he said. “There were quite a few people out there, but later in the afternoon most had given it up and left. But we knew the fish were going to move in there about dark or a little before, so we stuck around for a while.”
Initially, Dwayne (who’s older than Twayne by about five minutes) said his younger brother thought that he had snatched the record from him on Wednesday evening.
“He said, ‘That’s a 4-pound fish. I think he’s bigger than mine,’” Dwayne Hosea said with a chuckle. “But he just didn’t quite make it.”
