A South Carolinian has damaged the state’s 2018 file for flathead catfish. Patrol Sergeant Joseph Driggers of Mars Bluff caught the 110-plus pound monster cat on a Santee rig whereas fishing a 40-foot deep again eddy on the Pee Dee River. It crushed the earlier file by almost 30 kilos.
“Me and my two youthful brothers determined we’d go catch a pair catfish on the Pee Dee down right here in decrease Florence County,” Driggers tells F&S. “We had been primarily fishing log jams and little again eddies, simply searching for deep holes. It’s extraordinarily low down right here as a result of drought.”
A Final-Minute Document Breaker
Towards the top of their journey, Driggers and his brothers discovered a gap they’d by no means fished subsequent to a practice trestle, roughly 25-feet deep, he says. They caught one first rate blue cat there earlier than it stopped producing. “We had been heading again to the touchdown, and I noticed an space that I’ve pushed previous for 10 or 12 years however by no means fished,” he provides. “I simply threw a pair traces out whereas we had been tidying up the boat, and he hit it like a freight practice.”
Driggers says the enormous catfish swam deep and hugged the underside after it slammed into this Santee rig. “After quarter-hour of preventing him, I lastly obtained him to come back in, and that was just about it,” he remembers.
Typically known as a Santee-Cooper rig, the setup that Driggers was utilizing was pioneered within the mid-Eighties round Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie—two well-known South Carolina fisheries in their very own proper. “You employ a slide swivel with a plastic tube with a clip on it,” he says. “I used to be utilizing a 5-ounce pancake weight. That slides right down to a bead on the top that goes right down to a pacesetter. It holds the bait up, in all probability 5-to-6-inches off the underside, and retains it within the strike zone.”
It was heavy sort out, with a 50-pound chief, Driggers remembers, however he wasn’t anticipating to hook a 100-plus-pound fish. “I known as a few of my mates at [the South Carolina] DNR that I’ve labored with, being in regulation enforcement, and we went to an area place in Johnsonville known as the Skinning Shed to get a round-about weight.”
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The size on the Skinning Shed learn 113 kilos. “However they had been utilizing an previous cotton scale,” Driggers says. “The DNR guys had been like, ‘Yeah, we have to hurry up and discover a licensed scale.” Driggers says he met two SCDNR fisheries biologist on the Lands Finish Marina Georgetown, and so they recored the flathead’s official weight at 113.7 kilos.
Paul Daniels of Hanahan, SC caught the earlier South Carolina file for flathead catfish. It weighed near 85 kilos. For scale, the Worldwide Gamefish Affiliation’s all-tackle world file, caught in Kansas in 1998, weighed 128 kilos even.
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