Chad Vance is an old hand at limb-line fishing for catfish, having grown up using the technique with family members. The 39-year-old Cheatham County Sheriff’s Department officer was checking a limb line in a small canoe mid-day on June 12 on Cheatham Lake, not far from Ashland City, Tenn. He would break the lake record for flathead catfish — after a bit of a wrestling match.
“I went to a lake shore to check a limb line that had broken twice previously, so I figured there was a big catfish there,” he told Wired2fish. “I rigged the limb line the third time with a half-gallon jug. That way if the fish broke off again, at least I could find it with the floating jug attached to the limb line.”
Vance paddled to the limb line spot, and the 150-pound test cord was gone. A fish had taken a half-pound skipjack herring bait on a 9/0 hook, suspended 7 feet off the bottom in 18 feet of water – and simply swam away.
“I looked down the lake, and there was my jug floating, so I took off in my canoe after it,” continued Vance, from Pegram, Tenn. “Just as I got to the jug, it went down. I waited a bit, and the jug popped up on the surface, so I tied another half-gallon jug to the line.”
But the fish took both jugs down again, said Vance. He waited for a time in his canoe, knowing it would take a heck of a catfish to pull down two half-gallon jugs. The jugs eventually came to the surface, showing where the fish was. Vance padded to them, and this time tied on a larger one-gallon jug, which the catfish took down again.
“I felt like the guy in the movie Jaws, fitting barrels to the big shark to slow it down and bring it up to the surface,” Vance said laughing. “The catfish came up again, I grabbed the jugs and manhandled the fish to my canoe with the heavy cord.
“When I got it close and saw how big the fish was it rattled me pretty good.”
Vance didn’t have a net, so somehow, he grabbed the massive flathead catfish and rolled it into his 14.5-foot canoe. He knew he had a giant of a fish, and wanted to get it weighed on certified scales.
Vance says he had a lot of help from friends and lakeshore folks to locate a large container they could fill with water to keep the catfish alive in the back of Vance’s truck. He had a portable aerator to keep the tank water fresh, then took off to find a large scale to weigh his very much alive catfish.
After several stops trying to find a scale large enough to weigh his fish, he stopped at a feeder store in the town of Pleasant View. They weighed the fish twice, each time on a different feed sack scale.
“It weighed 55.4 pounds, and was just under 50 inches long,” says Vance. “I didn’t know at the time that there were official records for catfish from Cheatham Lake. But there are, and mine topped the old record cat.”
Vance’s fish bettered the previous lake record of 44 pounds caught in 2018.
Once the fish was weighed on certified scales and witnessed, Vance dashed back to the area where he caught the cat, took it out of the aerated tank in his truck, and revived the fish for a while in Cheatham Lake.
“The fish still had lots of color, and was upright and breathing fine at the bank,” he said. “I touched the fish in the water, and it took off like a shot. That big cat was just fine.”
He says it took about 90 minutes to leave the lake with the fish, weigh it, and return to the lake and release it.
Vance says he caught a flathead in Cheatham Lake last year in August that was in the 60 pound range, though he didn’t weigh it before releasing the cat.
“I’m sure there’s a 70-pounder swimming around the lake somewhere,” Vance said. “If I ever catch one that big, I’ll release it, too – but I’ll have a replica mount made to remember that catfish forever.”
