Vern Evans
Kimberly Feltner and her husband, Shawn, braved the wind and rain on Sept. 28 to fish the Ohio River with their friend and local guide, Chris Souders. It was the day after Hurricane Helene struck the region, and the river was swollen from all the heavy rain. This bump in current helped get the fish moving, and the three anglers were finding some blue cats near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where the Kanawha River joins the Ohio.
“It was almost 9 a.m. and we’d just caught our second small catfish when I heard something,” Souders, who runs Slunger Cat Outdoors, tells Outdoor Life. “One of my Penn reels’ drag was screaming and I turned to see the rod it was on was doubled over at the boat stern.”
He says Feltner, who lives in Indiana, jumped on the rod right away. She fought the catfish while he cleared their other lines.
“I had six other deep lines out,” Souders says. “I was lucky to get them in before they tangled.”
Souders kept his 20-foot aluminum boat anchored while Feltner worked on the fish. It ran deep several times, and about 10 minutes into the fight, Souders says Feltner was about ready to give up. But she stayed with it long enough to tire out the big blue cat and get it near the boat, where Souders netted it and then rolled it over the gunnel.
“I knew right away it was going to be a state length record,” says Souders, who grew up fishing the Ohio River and lives in Oak Hill. “I’ve caught at least four blue cats that were almost record-length fish, and I knew Kim’s fish was longer.”
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After taping the catfish, Souders called his friend Ryan Bosserman, who works as a fisheries biologist for the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. He filled Bosserman in and asked him to meet them at the Robert C. Byrd Lock and Dam for an official measurement.
“It was a boat a 30-minute run there, and Ryan measured and weighed the fish on the spot.”
The blue cat’s official weight was 64.15 pounds and shy of the current state weight record — a 69.45-pound fish caught by Michael Drake in 2023. But at 50.82 inches from tip to tail, it was just long enough to edge out that same fish for the state length record. (Drake’s fish was roughly a third of an inch shorter, at 50.51 inches long.) Bosserman estimated the blue cat’s age at around 20 years old.
Souders says Feltner’s state-record catfish ate a cut mooneye bait that was fished near the bottom on an 8/0 hook. He says the fish was near a ledge drop in the middle of the river, and he thinks the heavy rain from the hurricane helped trigger a bite by increasing the river’s current.
After getting the fish’s official measurements, the three anglers returned to where it was caught and released it back into the Ohio River. They finished out their day strong, catching and releasing some more blue cats, including one that Souder thinks went 40 pounds.
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“We released all our fish,” Souders says, “They’re a lot more valuable in the river than in a cooler.”
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