Catfish anglers in Georgia are enjoying a remarkable season as three records have fallen during the past month.
Most notable was the Oct. 17 catch of a 110-pound, 6-ounce blue catfish on the Chattahoochee River, by a visiting angler from Florida.
Tim Trone’s catch – his goal had been merely to land his first 50-pound catfish – shattered the state record by more than 17 pounds.
“The tail comes out the water and all I thought was, ‘Man, I got my 50-pound fish. I’ve got the 50-pounder,’ ” Trone told Fox 8 News.
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On Oct. 27, Aaron Churchwell, a veteran catfish angler from Rome, Ga., landed a 52-pound, 1-ounce blue catfish on Allatoona Lake in northwestern Georgia.
That smashed a lake record (44 pounds) set on Oct. 10.
Churchwell was targeting flathead catfish with live shad, but that wasn’t working so he caught a small channel catfish and used a hunk of its flesh to entice the giant blue catfish.
“I’ve fished Allatoona for about four years now, and there’s one little area on the lake that holds big fish, but they are not easy to catch,” Churchwell told Gon.com. “We mark them there all the time, but you just can’t get them to eat. We were drifting through, and every time we’d drift across it, we would catch one a little bigger.”
The record-setting catfish was kept in a live well overnight and weighed the next day. A state biologist certified the weight before Churchwell released the fish.
The 44-pound blue catfish was caught on live shad by Arturo Medina, who had been fishing for striped bass. The catch narrowly broke the Allatoona Lake record set in 2017.
Medina, who also released his fish, held the record for 17 days.
–Images show Aaron Churchwell (first and third), Tim Trone (second) and Arturo Medina with their giant blue catfish catches
