World Record Pike: The 55 lb German Fish, the 46 lb American One and the State Records

The world record pike weighs 55 lb 1 oz (25 kg). Lothar Louis caught it on a spoon in a German lake on October 16, 1986, and no northern pike has beaten it on the IGFA’s books in four decades. The best North American fish is nine pounds lighter and 46 years older: 46 lb 2 oz (20.9 kg), from a New York reservoir in 1940. Both catches are documented down to the tackle. Most of the bigger pike you will read about are not.

The man who caught North America’s biggest pike, a 46 lb 2 oz world record in 1940, never had it mounted. The taxidermist wanted $52.50.

The records, world to state

The top of the table is a ladder with one missing rung. Three fish between 45 and 47 lb, then nothing until 55 lb.

Lothar Louis and the 55 lb 1 oz pike

The IGFA’s own account is short. “Lothar was fishing the Lake of Grefeern in Germany when this pike struck his spoon. After a 40-minute fight he was able to land this incredible fish.” The IGFA spells the water “Grefeern.” Most other sources write Greffern.

The record sits on the IGFA’s list of 20 enduring world records. The fish closest to it in the record book are also European and also from cold water. Åke Nilsson’s 47 lb 4 oz pike came from Lödde, Sweden, on January 28, 1989, on 12 lb line. Giacomo Pinotti’s 43 lb 3 oz (19.6 kg) fish came from Lago Maggiore, Switzerland, on December 10, 1990, on 8 lb line and a live whitefish. Paolo Pacchiarini took a 43 lb (19.5 kg) pike on a fly at Centro Cadore Lake, Italy, on August 5, 2020, and released it.

Note the months: October, January, December. Big pike prefer cool water. Females are the bigger sex, and a female runs heaviest in the months before the spring spawn.

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Peter Dubuc and the fish he would not pay to mount

Peter Dubuc lived on Benedict’s Bay on New York’s Great Sacandaga Lake, then called the Sacandaga Reservoir, and fished it almost daily. The story of September 15, 1940, comes from a 1959 Outdoor Life article by Ben East, built on interviews with Dubuc.

1. The tackle. A 6 ft rod, 12 lb line and a 48 in bronze leader. The lure was a 6 in wooden flap-tail plug with two treble hooks.
2. The spot. A quiet bay of submerged stumps near Benedict, in 9 or 10 ft (about 3 m) of water.
3. The fight. The pike took 115 ft of line on one run. Landing it took an hour, with Dubuc working the fish away from the stumps.
4. The scales. It was weighed twice, on beam scales both times, “once in the town of Broadalbin, then again in Albany”: 46 lb 2 oz, 52½ in long, 25 in (64 cm) around. His daughter remembers the first scale as Pelcher’s store in Benedict.
5. The mount. There was none. The price quoted was $52.50, and Dubuc did not care much for mounted fish.

The reservoir was ten years old that fall, and so was the fish. A local history estimates it “was only ten years old at the time it was caught,” a small fingerling when the Conklingville Dam was completed. The biggest pike on the continent was no older than the lake it swam in. In Alaska’s Interior, by contrast, a pike of 15 lb can be 10 to 17 years old.

Dubuc’s fish was the world record for about 40 years. Accounts of when it fell give dates from 1979 to 1986. On the catch’s 75th anniversary, in September 2015, the Great Sacandaga Lake Fisheries Federation put up a roadside marker at Benedict Loop in Broadalbin.

It is still the North American record. Wisconsin DNR puts it plainly: “the national record is held by a 46-pound northern pike caught in a New York reservoir in 1940.” Some pages say a Canadian pike later beat it. No such fish turns up in any record list. Canada’s own fisheries agency says the country’s largest pike is “usually identified as the 19 kg fish caught in Stoney Rapids, Saskatchewan in 1954,” about 42 lb.

Why the biggest pike are European

Canada’s fisheries agency says it in one line: “European and Asian pike end up larger than those in North America.” The record book agrees. In the IGFA’s roundup of its largest pike records, every fish over 35 lb is European. The largest North American entry is a 31 lb 5 oz (14.2 kg) junior record from Dore Lake, Saskatchewan, in 2013. Next comes Bradley Befus’s 30 lb 8 oz (13.8 kg) fly-rod fish from Alaska’s Innoko River in 1996.

American agencies set the ceiling lower too. Alaska says “length to 4 feet, weight to 40 lbs.” Ohio says 48 in and 25 lb. Iowa calls a pike over 20 lb “rare in Iowa waters.” When a US page prints a maximum of 62.5 lb, as the Fish and Wildlife Service does, that is a world figure. FishBase lists the largest published pike at 28.4 kg (62.6 lb) and 150 cm (59 in).

The pike that never saw a scale

Pike legends are older than record books. Wisconsin DNR tells the best one: a “19-foot, 550-pound, 267-year-old northern pike hauled out of a lake in Wurttemberg, Germany in 1497.” Its skeleton was kept in Mannheim cathedral. It “was later found to contain vertebrae from several fish.” The story is now known as the Mannheim Hoax.

Later claims of pike far heavier than 55 lb share one weakness: no certified scale and no record body behind them. Most are one of two things. Either the fish was a muskellunge, the pike’s larger cousin, which grows past 60 lb and is told apart by the pattern on its flank and the pores under its jaw. Or the fish was real and nobody weighed it in a way a record body could accept. The muskie’s own record story is messier still, and the world record muskie page sorts the documented fish from the legends.

What a record-class pike measures

North Dakota Game and Fish publishes average weights for pike of every length. They show how far above normal the record fish sit.

Dubuc’s pike was 52½ in long. An average fish of 50 in weighs 30 lb, and his weighed 46 lb 2 oz. Alaska’s biologists give the same scale from the other side: 20 lb pike run 39 to 43 in, and 30 lb pike run 47 to 52 in. A record pike is not just long. It is a thick, heavy fish for its length, which is why the formulas that use girth as well as length come closest; the fish weight calculator takes both.

How rare is a 40 in pike? Rare enough that states write rules around it. Michigan aged 7,726 pike from 109 lakes. The average fish was 24.6 in at age 5, and only two lakes gave enough ten-year-olds to average, at 36.6 in. The state puts the usual life span at six to eight years, so most Michigan pike die before they reach 40 in. A Minnesota DNR study works it out for a 100-acre lake: keeping one 35 in fish uses up the lake’s whole yearly production of large pike.

How old is a 20 lb pike? Alaska’s wildlife notebook says fish of 15 lb or over “may be 10 to 17 years of age.” Dubuc’s ten-year-old giant, in a ten-year-old reservoir, was the exception.

Which US states have pike? The native range runs from Alaska to Labrador and south to Pennsylvania, Missouri and Nebraska. Introductions have put pike outside their native range in 38 states. That is why Utah and Georgia have state records at all, and why the pike family hub has a page for nearly every region.

Has a pike ever attacked a person? Bites happen and are minor. In Finland in June 2025 a man rinsing his hands at a lakeshore was bitten on three fingers, he thinks by a pike of about 16 in (40 cm) he had seen there the summer before. He needed a tetanus shot and no stitches. A Finnish fisheries scientist called it “a predatory reflex” and said pike “rarely attack people” except when an angler is removing a hook. The northern pike teeth page covers what those teeth do to a hand.

For the fish itself, with growth, seasons and identification, the northern pike page is next; for catching one, how to catch northern pike.

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The Pike & Muskie Cheat Sheet. A 16-page PDF. Read the water temperature, find your season on the sheet, and it tells you where pike and muskie sit and what to throw. Behind the sheet: pike, muskie, tiger and pickerel told apart at the net, 13 lures by water temperature, the quick-strike rig drawn and tied, the teeth and how to unhook one without a cut, which fish to keep, and every record.

• Three temperatures for each fish, when they spawn, feed best and slow down, and the 80 °F line where Maryland says leave the muskies alone
• Where the big pike go in August, the 61–70 °F water the big ones leave the weeds for, measured on tagged fish, with rising and falling water for both fish on one page
• 13 lures by water temperature, from a 1 oz spoon at ice-out to a 10 in double bucktail at 65 °F, with the leader rule and the quick-strike rig drawn
• Pike, muskie, tiger or pickerel at the net, the marks that work when color fails, how to unhook one without a cut, and which fish to keep for the pan

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