It was about 8 a.m. when Tucker Sepaugh hooked into a large catfish.
It was March 19, and Tucker was fishing together with his dad, Aaron, and veteran information William Oliver in northeast Texas. They have been focusing on large flatheads on the 4,700-acre Lake Tyler when a rod acquired bit.
Tucker picked up the heavy-duty customized bait-casting rod and put his 90-pound physique to work battling the deep cat. However it quickly turned apparent that the flathead was extra fish than the 11-year-old might fairly deal with.
“After a couple of minute or so his arms straightened out, fatigued from the fish. It was simply an excessive amount of for him,” Oliver, 39, tells Out of doors Life. “Tucker needed to get assist from his dad to cease the catfish’s run.”
Figuring out that Tucker was both going to lose the rod to the fish or get pulled into the lake, Aaron and Oliver helped carry the catfish to the boat.
As a result of Tucker wanted help, the 72-pound flathead was not eligible as a record-setting catch. (No multiple angler can contact the rod for it to be a report.) Had Tucker miraculously landed the fish on his personal, the 72-pounder would have set a Texas youth report for the heaviest flathead catfish ever caught within the state.
The present state youth report is a 70-pound flathead was caught in 2010 by Ashleigh DeFee from Lake Tawakoni.
“We weighed the fish after I hauled it aboard, then I tagged it and launched the fish again into the lake,” says Oliver, a full-time fishing information from Chandler. “We have been solely in search of large catfish that day, and we caught three or 4 – tagging all of them and releasing them.”
Oliver has tagged over 1,000 catfish on Lake Tyler and close by Lake Palestine. He targets large flathead catfish utilizing forward-facing sonar and has realized lots from his FFS efforts and his tagging.
His tagging is lawful in Texas, the place he works with state biologist Jake Norman to share details about the catfish he catches and releases.
“I’ve discovered that the massive catfish like cowl comparable to logs, stumps, brush piles, these kinds of issues, and so they maintain to them very tight,” he says. “Over time I’ve realized that large catfish use the identical spots and so they can journey nice distances from one log or brush pile to a different one.
“Ahead-facing sonar actually helps spot fish on that form of cowl, however they’re much harder to determine than another species like crappies or bass as a result of they maintain so tight to logs and brush.”
Oliver says his shoppers have caught flathead catfish from brush piles miles other than the place he’d beforehand launched them, and sometimes simply days aside.
“I used to suppose that flathead cats have been very territorial and didn’t transfer round a lot,” he mentioned. “However that’s not so.”
Oliver says one 31-pound flathead that he tagged and launched was caught almost 4 miles away per week later by one other shopper. One other time, certainly one of Oliver’s shoppers launched a 12-pound cat that he tagged and launched; one other shopper caught the identical fish six days later, almost six miles away.
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“I take advantage of aspect sonar to find good cowl spots and use FFS to examine a spot and discover particular large catfish on cowl,” he says. “My sonar isn’t particular. Plenty of anglers use the identical Garmin items. However catfish maintain so tight to cowl that it takes observe to be taught what to look ahead on sonar screens to pinpoint cats, even large ones.”
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