Monster Catfish Willamette River Oregon
Recently Drew9870, a member of The Oregon Fishing Forum, caught a remarkable fish. I contacted him to see if he would like to share his story for my readers to see. Thankfully he obliged. So here it is. Awesome fish bro!!!
“I had just got back from the jetty at about 7PM on March 3rd, had been fishing since 6AM. I just finished cleaning a keeper Lingcod, and got a call from my other buddy asking if I want to do some night fishing, and I couldn’t turn that down no matter how worn out I am.
We had set up at about 11:00pm and had the rods out, I use a baitrunner reel which is a spinning reel with a front and rear drag and a switch on the back to go from the front (main) drag to the rear (clicker) drag, I keep it on the lowest setting. By 11:45, the clicker was running steady at about 2.5ft per second, I didn’t need to set the hook with 50lb braided line, so I disengaged the clicker and lifted the tip, the fight was on and the fish rose up to the surface about 65yrds out and wasn’t peeling much drag. After 7-8 minutes, the fish was at the docks edge and my legs were trembling, the net was as long as the fish and almost ripped while hoisting the large river monster out of the water. We continued to fish until 3:30AM with just a couple more twitches and nibbles.
An ODFW Biologist was more than happy to collect the fish the next/same day to do sampling on it and see if these fish are capable of spawning, it is just as much of a surprise to the biologist to see this rare catch as it is to me.”
You can read a newspaper article about this too if you like. But i prefer Drew’s story! Thanks again Drew!
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