While plenty of 100-pound and larger flatheads have been caught by unconventional methods - including trotlines, commercial nets and snaglines - no other state rod-and-reel record approaches the century mark. While no one particularly doubts the fish's amazing dimensions - verified by the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks - the legitimacy of the catch itself has occasionally been called in to question, due to the light tackle used to apparently land the monster while Paulie was crappie fishing. Extracted from Elk City Reservoir, Kansas in May 1998, Paulie's record cat measured 61-inches with a 43.75-inch girth. And yet, few diehard catfish folks would be completely shocked if the next world record flathead surpasses Ken Paulie's current 123-pound monster. It's commonly believed that the blue catfish represents the largest North American catfish species. The giant cat measured 61-inches with a 43.75-inch girth. Ken Paulie's 123-pound flathead stands as the accepted world record, extracted from Elk City Reservoir, Kansas in May 1998. Some of the country's best anglers, however - including King - believe a 200 still swims. Beyond Buggs Island, Gaston and America's big rivers, the 'where,' 'when' and 'how big' of the next record blue catfish remains anyone's guess. Lake Gaston has already produced at least a few fish over 100-pounds, including the 117-pound 8-ounce North Carolina state record, caught by a 15 year old angler in June 2016. Although Anderson has remained tight-lipped about his exact location and bait, the fish was allegedly caught below the tree bridges area near Clarksville, Virginia his world record application reportedly stated "chicken breast."ĭuring the past year, the next downstream reservoir on the Roanoke River system has emerged as a potential site for another record blue. With help from his father and stepbrother, Anderson eventually wrestled the gargantuan blue, which boasted a 57-inch length and massive 47-inch girth, into his pontoon. The current 143-pound record blue bit high school football coach Nick Anderson's bait while fishing Virginia's Kerr (Buggs Island) Reservoir in June 2011.
Yet while several previous world blue cat records have been pulled from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, including fish of 130 and 121 pounds, it's becoming increasingly clear that the biggest fish may in fact live in large reservoirs. World blue cat records are toppling at a rapid rate the current benchmark was set by Nick Anderson's 143-pounder from Virginia's Buggs Island Reservoir in 2011.
For this was a bygone era when no one worried about world records when monstrous river dams didn't yet exist and before large-scale commercial fishing had taken hold. Whether or not you believe such giant cats ever lived, you can't completely discount the tales out of hand. Even Mark Twain once talked of "a Mississippi catfish that was more than six feet long and weighed 250 pounds." Another 'fish sensation' was brought in about 1868 when two men brought into Hermann, Missouri a blue cat that tipped the scales at 242 lb." Heckman's tome cites additional evidence suggesting that 125 to 200-pound blues taken from the Missouri and Mississippi rivers were fairly common in the 1800s. This fish, caught in 1866, was a blue channel cat and weighed 315 pounds. On the pages of a tattered old book titled Steamboating: Sixty-Five Years on Missouri's Rivers, author William Heckman describes several well-documented accounts of truly colossal North American catfish: "Of interest to fishermen is the fact that the largest known fish ever caught in the Missouri River was taken just below Portland, Missouri.
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