Justin Hodge grew up fishing the Suwannee River with his dad and grandpa, setting bush hooks (a.k.a. limb lines) for gators and catfish. They’ve always caught decent-sized channels and blue cats there, but this past winter, they started thinking more about the Suwannee’s true potential.
“Me and my dad got to talking about how the river ain’t never went dry,” Hodge says, “and how there’s got to be some bigger fish in there.”
Between Feb. 9 and 13, Hodge and his dad fished the river for three days and caught 10 blue cats up to 30 pounds. Their real focus, though, was locating and studying the deepest holes along the river. Hodge, who runs an Alweld Invader, a shallow-running johnboat, didn’t have forward-facing sonar or any other fancy electronics onboard. So, they plumbed the depths the old-fashioned way.
“We’d just drop anchor and see where it touched and where it wouldn’t touch,” Hodge explains. “I mean, we’d know where a general hole was, but we used the anchor to really figure out where [a hole] started … and where the deepest spots were.”
With a better map of the river in his head, Hodge was back on the Suwannee on Feb. 15. This time, he was joined by his buddy Wyatt Allen. The two spent the morning catching bream for bait, and they’d landed three or four keeper-sized catfish by noon. Then a thunderstorm rolled in and pushed them off the water.
Back at the boat ramp, the two fishermen hung out under a shelter and cleaned the few fish they’d caught while waiting for the storm to pass. By 5 p.m. or so the weather had let up, and they went right back to the same deep hole they’d fished that morning. Using cut bream baited on big hooks and heavy spinning rods with 100-pound braid, they caught two fish back-to-back before the giant blue hit.
“It wasn’t 45 minutes after we put the boat back in,” Hodge says. “And I knew once I hooked him. I told my buddy, ‘This is either a sturgeon or a catfish. Whatever it is, it’s big.’”
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Hodge’s drag was cranked down tight, and he was worried he might break the fish off during its initial run. But he was able to turn the catfish quickly, and he says the battle didn’t last long once the fish came up off the bottom. Allen was ready with the landing net until they saw the huge fish.
“Once he rolled up top and we saw him, my buddy [Wyatt] just threw the net in the bottom of the boat,” Hodge says. “He grabbed one of those plastic lipper things, and that fish broke it as soon as we tried to mash it on his lips. So then I just wrapped the leader around my hand, and luckily he was hooked well enough that I just drug him into the boat.”
The two anglers kept on fishing, but Hodge was still distracted by the huge blue cat he’d caught.
“We probably fished for another hour with him laying in the bottom of the boat, and we were just looking at him, shocked at what we’d caught,” Hodge says. “I was thinking in my head, too, that I could throw a bag of corn in my truck one-handed, but I couldn’t even pick [this fish] up with one hand.
“So I called another buddy, D.J. Rogers, and I was telling him, ‘Bro, you gotta bring us a scale to the boat ramp. I think I’ve caught the state-record catfish … I can barely hold him up to take a picture with him.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I’m on the way. Y’all meet me at the boat ramp.’”
After getting a weight of 73 pounds back at the ramp, Hodge knew he had a record on his hands. (The previous record, set in 2015, weighed 69.5 pounds.) So he called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. An FWC officer eventually arrived at the ramp around midnight, and they all went to a seafood market to use a certified scale, which showed 73.6 pounds. The fish measured 48.75 inches long with a 36.75-inch girth.
Up until that point, Hodge and Allen had kept the fish in the water in the hopes of releasing it alive. But after learning that it would also have to be inspected by a fisheries biologist, they accepted the fact that the fish would die and they took it home in Hodge’s cooler.
“Heck, I had him in a 120 quart Igloo and he had that thing full,” Hodge says. “He was just as big and wide as that cooler, and his tail was dang near curled up in there. He could have actually been closer to 80 pounds when I first caught him.”
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That next morning, the biologist came to verify the species as a blue cat. He also estimated the fish’s age at around 55 to 60 years old. FWC made Hodge’s record official at the end of February, and the agency finally announced the record on social media on Tuesday.
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