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. Below are both stories, the state records with their dates, the legends that never made a scale, and what a record-class pike measures on a tape.

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 organization’s files 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.

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 at a store in Benedict and again on beam scales in Albany: 46 lb 2 oz, 52½ in long, 25 in (64 cm) around.
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. A local history says the pike “was estimated to be only ten years old at the time it was caught, having been a small fingerling when the Conklingville Dam was completed.” So 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 turned 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. Wikipedia’s summary of such reports is fair: they “are either misidentifications of the pike’s larger relative, the muskellunge, or simply have not been properly documented and belong in the realm of legend.”

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. In-Fisherman’s Dr. Rob Neumann notes that formulas using girth as well as length are often the most accurate. 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 36.6 in at age 10, and the state puts the usual life span at six to eight years. Most Michigan pike die before they reach 40 in. Minnesota found that taking one 35 in fish can use up a 100-acre lake’s whole yearly production of big 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.

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 by a pike of about 16 in (40 cm). 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, see northern pike, and for tactics, how to catch northern pike. The pike’s bigger cousin has a messier record story on the world record muskie page, and the muskie page explains how to tell the two apart. Every member of the family is on the pike family hub.