It was about 11 p.m. on June 28 and Walter Dorough of Hillsboro, Ga. was anchored at a favorite spot on 4,700-acre Lake Jackson, located about mid-way between Atlanta and Macon.
“I had a cut bluegill bait out on a 12/0 circle hook with a Santee Cooper catfish rig,” Dorough tells Wired2fish. “I was anchored in 8 feet of water on a flat near a river mouth drop-off into a deep lake channel that went down to 30 feet.”
He had a bunch of baited lines out and had just caught a smaller catfish when a big fish hit. It was so strong Dorough figured it was a flathead cat.
The big cat fought much tougher than anything Dorough had ever experienced, and he’s a long-time tournament catfish angler. He was fishing solo, and wished he’d had someone along to help.
“It started doing circles around my 18-foot Tracker boat, and I had to work hard to keep the fish from tangling in my other lines,” said the 39-year-old maintenance manager. “There wasn’t much I could do.
“The fish even wrapped my fishing line around my boat anchor rope and I thought it would break off. But somehow, I got it out from around the anchor rope and kept fighting the fish.”
Dorough’s heavy, catfish-tough 7-foot spinning rod and 30-pound test line held. And after a 20-minute dogged fish fight, the cat came up beside his boat.
“I was worn out by the time I got the fish in my oversize catfish net, and it barely fit,” Dorough continued. “I couldn’t believe it was a blue cat. I’ve fished that lake for years and had no idea it had blue cats that size.”
The oversize catfish wouldn’t fit in his boat’s live well, so he laid it on the boat floor, called a friend and raced back to the boat ramp. There he met his pal Clay Bishop, who’s the tournament director of the Middle Georgia Catfish Anglers club, and a good friend of Dorough’s.
Bishop has a certified scale for weighing tournament fish. Dorough also called his wife Lauren, who drove from their home to the boat ramp to watch the weighing of Walter’s massive catfish.
Dorough’s giant blue catfish weighed 71-pounds, 9.6-ounces. It crushes the old unofficial Lake Jackson blue catfish record of 46-pound, 7-ounces caught in 2018 by angler Luke Chandler.
Georgia’s DNR doesn’t maintain lake records, only state ones.Tim Trone holds the Georgia blue cat record with a 110-pound, 6-ounce fish caught from the Chattahoochee River in Oct. 2020.
“We released my big catfish after weighing it right there at the lake, and it swam off just fine,” said Dorough. “I’d like to have a taxidermist make a replica mount of that catfish – which would make a great Christmas present to me from my wife or Santa.”
