Two massive catfish caught in July break NC records, officials say. How big were they?
Joey Baird was about to give up on his fishing spot when he hooked a record-breaking catfish.
He was fishing over July 4 weekend in Six Pound Creek on Lake Gaston in North Carolina with his friend Mark Conroy, according to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. He told his friend that if they didn’t catch anything in the next 15 minutes, they should move to a different fishing hole, Baird told fishing company Catch The Fever in an interview.
“Right after I said that, the first fish of the night hit,” he said in the interview.
He said he knew right away it was a big fish when it folded the fishing rod down the side of the boat.
“Over the years of catching catfish, that drag is kind of like a telltale when you hear it ripping,” he told the company. “You know when it starts ripping a lot of times that you got a decent fish on it.”
Baird was right. The massive catfish he reeled in ended up breaking a North Carolina record.
The 121-pound, 9-ounce blue catfish surpassed the previous record: a 117-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish caught in June 2016 also on Lake Gaston, the NCWRC said in a release Monday.
Lake Gaston, which straddles the North Carolina-Virginia border, is “home to some massive blue catfish,” the agency says. Baird’s is the fourth state record to be caught there.
Baird’s catch wasn’t the only catch that broke a state record in July.
On July 20, an angler from Pikeville, Tyler Barnes, broke the 15-year freshwater fish record for flathead catfish in North Carolina, the NCWRC said.
He caught the 78-pound, 14-ounce fish in the Neuse River, the agency says.
Barnes caught it during the EZ3 Catfish Tournament, E-Z Bait & Tackle posted on Facebook. In a Facebook video, Barnes said the catfish was 9 ounces bigger than the previous record and he was worried about getting a biologist to confirm before the fish lost too much weight.
But it ended up surpassing the previous record: a 78-pound flathead, caught in the Cape Fear River in September 2005.
Both anglers released their catches back into the water.
Barnes posted a video on Facebook of him and another releasing his massive catch.
The fish were both caught using a Big Cat Fever fishing rod, the agency says. To qualify for a N.C. Freshwater Fish State Record, the fish must be caught on a rod and reel or cane pole, weighed on a scale the N.C. Department of Agriculture has certified, witnessed by at least one person and identified by a biologist.
