By Stephen Milandric
On December 13, 2014 I caught the largest blue catfish of my life. I was fishing the mighty James River with two great friends, Neil Renouf of Old Dominion Outdoors and Gary Harmon of Radford.
At approximately 1:23 p.m., I got hit powerfully hard! I reeled down fast with the rod still in the rod holder and it took less than a second to turn into stalemate between the fish and me. With all of my might, I managed to remove the rod from the holder and started reeling. I got about six or seven turns on the reel with the 30-pound test line, but I noticed that all of my cranking effort was in vain. The spool was motionless, not even turning, because the reel was governed by the drag and the fish was not budging. I knew I had something really big on, that’s for sure.
I fought the fish by slowly raising the rod tip up and then reeling as I lowered the rod tip back down, keeping tension on the rod at all times. I danced with the fish in this manner for what seemed like an eternity until finally I had the fish about twenty feet below the boat. Try as I may, I could not raise that fish to the surface. I would get him up about five or six feet below the surface, then he would bolt towards the bottom, striping line off of the reel with ease. I knew that I would lose this fish for sure if I let it get to the bottom of the river. There is just way to much debris on the bottom that would surely result in a snag and lost fish.
Now this vertical dance went on and on and on. I was very concerned considering 30-pound test line is on the light side for a blue cat such as this and I knew a line breakage would haunt me for the rest of my life. At this point, my forearms were burning so badly I was concerned that I was going to reach a point of failure with the use of my hands. Finally, like a miracle, I started putting more line on the reel than the fish was taking away on the downward surges. Then that giant catfish surfaced about thirty feet from the side of the boat!
I saw his massive head and back first, then way behind was his swirling tail. He looked just like a large shark. I went numb from my throat to my feet seeing all of this. My buddy, Gary, was holding the net and standing right behind me when the fish surfaced. Gary took a few steps backward, handed the net to Neil and said, “You net it. If I screw this up, Miklandric will surely kill me.”
Trying desperately to control my adrenaline, I continued to fight the fish to the side of the boat where Neil netted it. It took both Neil and Gary together to lift that netted beast into the boat. I fell back into the seat with my arms hanging uselessly off of my shoulders. I have never, ever in my wildest dreams been tested by a fish like this before. My fight with the fish seemed like hours, but in reality it was only about 20 minutes.
This monster blue catfish measured 54 inches in length with a 43-inch girth. He tipped the scales at 102 pounds 10 ounces, the largest caught on reel and rod out of the James River. There was no way I could hold that fish up for a photo so we rested it across my lap. It took the three of us to hold the fish while reviving it for the release back into the James. This was surely a day I will never ever forget.