A Maplewood, Missouri woman landed an 11-foot, 4-inch white sturgeon estimated to weigh between 1,100 and 1,200 pounds on British Columbia’s Fraser River, a catch her fishing guide believes could be the largest freshwater fish ever caught by a woman.
Katharine Eckert booked the sturgeon fishing trip after reading about former NHL defenseman Nick Leddy catching a monster fish in 2024 with Canadian outfitter Sturgeon Slayers.
“I saw that article and thought, that would be really cool to do sometime,” Eckert told FOX 2 in St. Louis. “Just something different to do on vacation rather than going to the beach or whatever.”
Eckert was fishing near Chilliwack, British Columbia, with her boyfriend, Justin, and Sturgeon Slayers founder Kevin Estrada when she hooked the fish. The fight lasted about 40 minutes.
“I remember thinking, ‘My gosh, this is really hard,'” Eckert said. “Once we got it closer to the boat, seeing it come out of the water a little bit, and realizing, ‘Oh, we have something really incredible,’ … I was in shock, but also grateful for the experience.”
Estrada said the sturgeon measured 60 inches around its body near the pectoral fins and 70 inches around its belly.
“Katharine’s sturgeon was just as fat as the longer fish caught a week earlier by the men,” Estrada told Wired2Fish, referring to another giant sturgeon his company helped land that measured 11 feet, 8 inches and was also estimated at roughly 1,200 pounds.
Estrada said he has not found a documented freshwater catch by a female angler that exceeds Eckert’s fish. But the potential record comes with a catch of its own: the sturgeon was never officially weighed.
White sturgeon in the Fraser River are protected under catch-and-release rules, so anglers cannot keep them for a certified scale weigh-in. Guides instead estimate weight from measurements, meaning Eckert’s fish is a contender for the record books but not an officially certified world record.
Eckert grew up fishing for bass and catfish with her father and has long been drawn to sturgeon — she has a sturgeon tattoo and named her dog Caviar.
“The pictures don’t really do it justice,” she said. “Being in the presence of something that big in the moment is definitely something I’ll never forget.”
The fish was measured, tagged and released back into the river as part of ongoing sturgeon conservation research, giving scientists a chance to track it in the future.
