Joe Driggers of Florence, South Carolina, says he’s fished the Great Pee Dee River most of his life. He knows it well and has caught plenty of the river’s catfish. But never in his fondest dreams did he think a catfish weighing well over 100 pounds prowled the deep holes of the Palmetto State river.
The river tracks for long miles and crosses from North Carolina into the low country of coastal South Carolina. Joe and his younger brothers Sam and Judd were in Joe’s 2016 Xpress aluminum boat anchored and fishing not far from a boat ramp near the town of Florence.
“We’d been fishing since that morning and had caught a 10-pound blue cat,” Joe told Wired2fish. “We’d moved to a sandbar near a big deep hole that had a kind of swirling back eddy near a log jam, anchored, and set out cut bream baits in about 30 feet of water near the bottom.”
The anglers used baitcasting tackle with heavy-duty “Mad Katz” rods and reels, with 50-pound test “Slime” line. Half bream baits were fitted to 8/0 circle hooks, pre-rigged that Joe had bought from “Slo Poke Bait & Tackle” in the town of Darlington.
“It’s a Santee catfish rig, with a little float keeping the bait just off bottom above 5-ounce pancake weights,” said 29-year old Joe, a local police sergeant.
The anglers settled into fishing their deep baits when suddenly one of the rods bent over double, with a fish taking the bait straight down-river.
“The fish ran hard, then kind of slowed down, stopped, and I realized it was going back up current,” Joe explained. “The fish was hugging the bottom, and I kept pumping and reeling it up.”
At first Joe thought the fish was a blue cat from how hard and fast it fought. But when it slowed down and stayed deep, not fighting as hard as he’d expected, he didn’t know what the fish was — until it came to the surface rolling on its side near his boat.
“I yelled — ‘Oh, that’s a good fish’ — when it came up and I saw it,” Joe said. “I’d never caught a fish over 20 pounds until this one showed.”
The fish was enormous, far bigger than their small dip net could handle. So Joe handed his rod to his brother Sam, reached overboard and grabbed the massive catfish’s head with both hands and rolled it into their boat.
Right away the brothers started thinking the fish could be a state record flathead because of its incredible size. They tried to think of where they could locate a big enough scale to weigh such a giant catch. They decided to go to the town of Johnsonville where they found a store with an old cotton bale scale that showed the fish weighed 113 pounds.
“I knew we had to get it weighed on certified scales, so I called some buddies with South Carolina’s DNR,” Joe explained. “They said to head to Georgetown Landing Marina at the river mouth near the coast, where a couple state biologists would meet me to officially weigh the fish.”
It was an hour drive to Georgetown, but the trip was worth it for the brothers. There, with DNR biologists present, Joe’s flathead catfish officially weighed 113.7-pounds with a 59-inch length and a 43-inch girth.
His flathead catfish is almost sure to become the new state record, far outweighing the previous record flathead cat weighing 84-pounds, 9.6 ounces caught in 2018 by Paul Daniels from the Cooper River.
Joe wanted to keep the fish alive to release it. But the long drive to get an official weight, and the biologists taking samples of the flathead, was too much for the fish to survive.
“The biologists took some of the fish’s spines for samples and the cat’s otoliths so they could age it,” Sam said.
The brothers then filleted the outsize flathead catfish, which is well known as excellent table fare.
“We’re having the family over tonight to enjoy some of those catfish fillets,” Joe reported happily to Wired2fish.
