![]() Miklandric and Renouf prefer chunks of freshly killed gizzard shad fished on 8/0 circle hooks. While fishing with guide Neil Renouf, Stephen Miklandric boated a 102-pounder from the James River in December 2014. Stephen Miklandric’s James River 102-pounder. Dominant prey among larger catfish was gizzard shad and juvenile blue catfish. A Virginia of study of over 16,000 blue catfish stomachs found that juvenile catfish primarily eat vegetation and invertebrates, switching to a mostly fish diet at 20 to 36 inches. With a rich abundance of forage, such as shad, herring, and prized blue crabs, the catfish population has exploded in the tidal rivers, and spread into the Potomac-also connected to Chesapeake Bay. But there are likely older fish in the population, given that the species can apparently live 25 to 30 years in some environments.”įarther north into Virginia, blue catfish became established in the James and Rappahannock rivers, somewhat infamously, when VDGIF stocked a small number of fish into these systems in the 1970s. “The oldest catfish we’ve aged at Kerr have been 19. Otolith aging of Anderson’s blue cat revealed it was 18 years old. “The flood of 1985 subsequently caused many lakes in the watershed to spill, likely resulting in blue catfish joining the Kerr Reservoir fish community,” he says. Virginia fishery biologist Dan Michaelson notes that the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) stocked blue catfish into several smaller impoundments in 1984. The rise of blue catfish in the Roanoke River, which flows from Virginia and into North Carolina before entering the Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, remains somewhat under suspicion. A 135 was also caught there in March of 2014, plus numerous others over 100 pounds, with most of the big fish caught in late fall through winter. Likely the second largest catfish ever recorded on hook and line was a 141-pound 12-ounce, 61-inch monster caught by Dale Lowe, Jr. Kerr, just upstream from Lake Gaston, has produced numerous 90- and 100-pound blues in recent years. Nearly nine years have passed now since high-school football coach Nick Anderson hoisted the current world-record blue, a 57-inch, 143-pound mammoth, from the waters of Kerr (Buggs Island) Reservoir. This particular giant blue, however, merely represents the next step in the intriguing story of a trio of lakes on the Roanoke River. Less than a year later, 15-year-old Landon Evans landed a 117-pound 8-ounce Lake Gaston blue while fishing from his dock. ![]() Royce’s second monster blue, weighed on the same certified scale at Lake Gaston Ace Hardware, overtook his fleeting state record catfish by 14 pounds. The fish ripped serious drag, and when we saw it, we were sure it was over a hundred pounds.” “Dad caught a 20-pounder before I got another bite. “We still had some good bait left, so my dad and I continued fishing,” he says. Having weighed the fish on a certified scale, he released the new North Carolina state record back into the water near its original catch site. Known for his 72-hour catfish benders on Lake Gaston, North Carolina, he hooked a 91-pound blue while controlled-drifting with a chunk of white perch. In December 2015, Royce pulled off an unthinkable accomplishment, boating two mega blue catfish in one 18-hour period. Piles of big stripers and cats had migrated up into the tailrace to feed. “The Kerr Lake dam was running non-stop, pumping huge volumes of water. “That September, we’d had a lot of rain and flooding and a big hurricane,” says Royce, an exceptional catfish angler and guide on Lake Gaston, North Carolina. Zakk Royce remembers the day, 17 years ago, when mega blue catfish first registered on his fishing radar.
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