It was a sunny Saturday with light winds at Lake Tawakoni, and the big blue cats weren’t firing for James Evans as they had been.
Just four days earlier, on March 2, the 47-year-old fishing guide and two female clients had enjoyed a remarkable day of fishing that produced a boatload of whoppers.
Their 10 biggest fish, including a 49-pounder, weighed 314 pounds. All were caught in 5 feet of water.
Cade Childress of Pickton, in east Texas just south of the Oklahoma border, hopped in the boat with Evans on the morning of March 6 hoping to get a piece of that action, but the skinny water bite just wasn’t panning out. Childress, 12, was gifted the fishing trip as a Christmas present from his grandfather, Brad Bradford.
“My shallow bite pretty much died,” said Evans, who runs Whisk’R Fish’N trophy guide service. “We spent most of the morning fishing alleys around stumps and timber, but it just wasn’t happening. I’m not sure what happened, but we never caught a fish.”
Around noon, Evans abandoned the shallows and headed to deeper water. He killed his outboard near a creek channel in 22 feet of water and said bon voyage to a bloody chunk of gizzard shad threaded onto a 10/0 stainless circle hook. The outfit was rigged with an in-line Demon Dragon rattling float to suspend the bait off bottom and reduce snags.
The guide said the bait had been drifting near bottom for about an hour when the rod suddenly bowed over. Childress, a seventh-grader at Como-Pickton ISD, quickly snatched the rod from the holder, and the battle was on.
The youngster’s dad, Shiloh, said it was pretty obvious his son had latched onto a piscatorial titan with a really bad attitude. He fought the fish for about two minutes before finally working it into the net.
“Cade only weighs 85 pounds, so it was pretty much a true tug of war between him and the fish,” he said. “He pressed his feet against the back seat to get leverage and keep from getting pulled overboard. The fish was just about as big as he is.”
The young angler did have a few pounds on the fat cat, but not many. Weighed on certified scales at Duck Cove Marina, the 50.75-inch blue catfish weighed 72.4 pounds.
Pending certification by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Angler Recognition Program, Childress’ catch will be a junior angler state record for blue catfish and a Tawakoni junior angler lake record.
Interestingly, the fish crushes another pending junior angler state record blue from Tawakoni that was caught a week earlier by 11-year-old Cowen Wittman of Kansas. Wittman was competing in the Catmasters catfish tournament on Feb. 26-27 when he landed a 67.92-pounder. The fish was documented on certified scales at the tournament weigh-in, according to Jennifer St. Ama of Catmasters.
Wittman’s fish topped the former record of 67 pounds set in March 2019 by Brayden Rogers of Temple. Rogers’ fish also was caught from Lake Tawakoni.
Matt Williams is a freelance writer based in Nacogdoches. He can be reached by email, mattwillwrite4u@yahoo.com.
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Original Source: https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/other-sports/2021/03/20/texas-youngster-wins-tug-of-war-with-a-blue-catfish-that-nearly-matched-him-pound-for-pound/
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