WATCH: 43-Pound 6-Year-Old Catches 41-Pound Striper

If you’ve ever seen a photo of someone with a big fish and wondered how they caught it, a 6-year-old boy from South Jersey will show you how it’s done.

Young Sam Adams from Pitman caught a 41-pound, 5-ounce striped bass in the surf at Spray Beach, down near Beach Haven, while fishing with his grandfather, Don Adams, on Friday. The catch was weighed and certified at Jingles Bait & Tackle in Beach Haven.

And lest you think he had help reeling in the behemoth, which measured 46-3/4 inches, there’s a YouTube video showing the boy -- who’s 47 inches tall and weighs in at a whopping 43 pounds -- doing all the work. Make no mistake, it’s work trying to bring a 41-pound fish onto the beach through the ebb and flow of the waves when that fish is pulling with all its might to get away.

During the 9-minute video, you can hear Don Adams coaching Sam along the way, but he keeps the camera on the boy until it’s time to pick up the fish at the water’s edge. And one thing is clear: Sam’s catch is proof that you don’t need to be powerlifter to catch a big fish; you just have to apply some physics -- and some leverage.

“It was the first video he ever took on his phone,” Scott Adams, Sam’s father and Don’s son, said Monday via email.

“Sam is an experienced fisherman,” Scott Adams said. “We go to the Outer Banks (in North Carolina) fishing every summer and we go bass fishing in local lakes. My dad takes him saltwater fishing a lot. He just loves to fish.”

The 6-year-old boy’s striper catch has him in second place out of 624 anglers entered in the 61st Annual LBI Surf Fishing Classic, which attracts anglers from around the region to the eight-week tournament. The tournament is sponsored in part by the Southern Ocean County Chamber of Commerce.

“We definitely didn’t expect this to go viral but the experience just hits home with a lot of people,” Scott Adams said of the video, which had about 1,000 views Saturday was at nearly 25,000 by Monday morning. “Hopefully it will encourage more people to take their kids fishing.”

Check it out here -- it might even inspire you to try a little surf fishing, too.

(Photo via Jingles Bait & Tackle)