A lifelong fisherman in Mississippi has smashed a state record after catching a “monster” catfish weighing in at 131lbs (59.4 kilograms).
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks said Eugene Cronley, of Brandon, caught the blue catfish on 7 April in the Mississippi River near Natchez.
“I’ve been catfishing all my life and I never dreamed of something like this,” Cronley told the Clarion Ledger.
He said he used a rod and reel with skipjack herring as bait and that it took him 40 minutes to catch the fish.
According to Cronley, the struggle with the fish began five minutes after his bait entered the water.
“We had to untie the boat and float down the river,” Cronley told the Clarion Ledger. “I couldn’t move him. I’d pull on him and take in a foot of line and he’d pull and take 10 ft. I just sat there like I was hung up.”
“It is truly a fish of a lifetime,” he said, adding, “He is a monster.”
Because of its sheer size, Cronley had to take the fish to Van’s Deer Processing and Sporting Goods in Rankin County, Mississippi, which had a certified scale large enough to weigh the fish.
The department said Cronley’s fish broke the previous rod-and-reel record of a 95-pound (43.1-kilogram) fish caught in 2009. It’s also larger than the 101-pound (45.8-kilogram) blue catfish caught by a team of two people in 1997. Both of those fish were also caught in the Mississippi River near Natchez.
Cronley was a little more than 10lbs shy of the world-record catch for a blue catfish, which was set in 2011 when a 143-pound (64.9-kilogram) behemoth was reeled in from a Virginia lake, according to the International Game Fish Association.
Cronley said his fish was 56.6 inches (1.4 meters) long with a girth of 41 inches (1.04 meters).
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, blue catfish usually grow up to two feet or less. In rare cases, they can exceed 5ft and 100lbs.
