QUINCY, ILL. — A federal program offering $100 for every invasive black carp pulled from the Mississippi River has paid out an unexpected $2.2 million — nearly all of it to a single, extraordinarily committed man.
As invasive carp have overrun the river, the Federal Fishing Carp Commission rolled out a bounty: $100 per black carp — the rarest and most destructive of the bunch — plus a modest 10 to 15 cents a pound for silver, bighead, and grass carp.
Officials assumed the black carp bounty was safe: they were, historically, far more rare to catch than the others. They had not accounted for Ricky “Carp Crusher” Bobbit.
A bowfishing YouTuber who specializes in deepwater carp, Bobbit did something no one at the Commission thought possible: he learned to tune his LiveScope sonar to a precise frequency that lights up the rare black carp hiding among the silvers and bigheads. “Once you see ‘em, you can’t unsee ‘em,” Bobbit said. “They glow. They’re basically asking for it.”
To scale up, he gutted a pontoon boat down to the bare aluminum, welded a raised shooting platform to the bow, and turned the whole thing into a floating carp-removal machine.
On a good day he hauls 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of fish — bowfishing, he says, “until she rides so low she’s almost a submarine.”
She did go fully under once. Bobbit was carrying a load worth more than $50,000 that afternoon when the overloaded pontoon finally sank out from beneath him. Mississippi River local Bubba “Mudcat” Wade heard him hollering, fired up his bass boat, and dragged Crusher — and the day’s catch — back to shore.
Bobbit rewarded him with $20,000 on the spot. There are hazards. Silver carp are famous for rocketing out of the water at passing motors, and Bobbit now films every trip in a hockey goalie mask after taking, by his own count, “one to the throat, two to the ribs, and one that knocked my hat clean into Iowa.” Ironically, Bobbit is currently its single largest budget line item, out-earning three field offices combined.
“They said harvest the carp,” Bobbit said, reloading. “I’m just doing what my country asked.”
