Sally Rhea Thomason is the kind of grandmother every young angler wishes for.
On April 8, she and her grandsons, 9-year-old Ford and 6-year-old Sam Zinn, headed out onto North Texas’s sprawling Lake Texoma to catch whopper catfish.
“Sally lives on Texoma and they fish from their own boat, usually for stripers,” fishing guide Paul Bates recently told Wired2fish. “But the boys wanted big catfish, so she set up a trip with me, and out we went.”
Set Up for Success
Bates, who’s 51 and has been a full-time Lake Texoma guide for four years, said that they started drifting with six baited spinning rods on a 20-foot deep flat.
The group was near the Red River mouth of the 89,000-acre lake on the Texas-Oklahoma border. There, they were bumping cut gizzard shad baits along bottom with Santee-Cooper catfish rigs.
The rig has a small float on a two-foot leader positioned midway between the hooked bait and a swivel. A sinker was placed on the main fishing line above the swivel toward the reel.
Bates fit a rattle in his Santee rig and used 80-pound leaders with 60-pound braided lines, from 7.5-foot heavy-action spinning rods. A two-ounce weight and an 8/0 circle hook completed his Santee set up.
The Fight Begins
As a rule, Bates releases all the catfish caught on his trips that weigh less than 15 pounds. The boys had caught a pair of “keeper” blue cats weighing 10 and 13 pounds that day. Then, at about noon, a rod bowed tightly, indicating that it had hooked one fighter of a catfish.
Grandmom Sally videoed the battle between her grandsons and the cat, with Bates helping the youngsters muscle the fish toward their bass boat.
“All I did was hold up the rod while the boys cranked the reel handle,” said Bates, a resident of Sherman, Texas. “That catfish was a tough one for ‘em.”
Catching a Colossal Cat
When the fish drew close to their boat, Bates manned the net and hauled the massive cat aboard. Both young boys were wild with excitement, as shown in the video made by Sally.
Young Sam said the catfish was as big as he was, and Ford couldn’t believe they boated a catfish that size.
Bates weighed the fish on a scale in his boat at 49.4 pounds. He said fish that heavy are rare on Texoma, though he catches plenty of 10- to 30-pounders with clients.
After the blue cat was weighed and photographed, Bates released it back into Texoma.
“That fish just whipped those two youngsters,” Bates said happily. “I’m sure they had no trouble falling asleep that night.”
