A Possible Record Catch, But Cooked Too Quickly

I keep getting fan mail from readers in Round Top telling me to stay in the garden. As a simple country boy from Schulenburg, it’s a great honor for such distinguished folks to speak so highly of my scribblings about vegetables. But I have other interests, too.

So let me tell y’all a fish story.

Last weekend my wife went fishing with her brother and our niece at his place on the Nueces River. The white bass were making their annual “run” up the river to spawn, which makes for some awesome, action-packed fishing. By the time she got there on Friday, the run was almost over. But while down there, they set some trot lines for catfish.

The Nueces has been extremely low for the past year. My brother-in-law’s place is sort of in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town is a little spot on the road called Swinney Switch – one gas station and a beer joint called the Dusty Saddle Saloon. It’s about halfway between George West and Mathis on Interstate 37, just upriver from the spot where the Nueces River enters Lake Corpus Christi. The area has an eclectic mix of hunting ranches, Amish settlements, and fish camps among the sea of brush.

My wife and her brother grew up down there, and they’ve fished that river their whole lives.

Janessa arrived Friday afternoon. They caught one white bass and a few catfish on the lines. She called me sort of disappointed that night. But it picked up the next day. When they went to check the lines after their morning run, they caught a monster. Janessa tried pulling it up to the boat, but she wasn’t strong enough. My brother-in-law even had a hard time landing it. He finally used a gaff-hook to bring it out of the water.

It was certainly the biggest blue cat they had ever caught. They reckoned it weighed about 50 lbs., but they had no scale. It would have taken a tape measure to determine the length. My brother-in-law has never been the type to hunt for horns or fish for a record. After the moment of excitement, they cruised back to the dock, filleted the fish, including that monster, and packed their catch on ice, never bothering to weigh or measure it.

Later that evening, a neighbor, Mark, came over. He’s an old family friend. They got to telling this story. He takes a look at the fillets and asks to see the photos they took.

“I think y’all just caught and filleted the Nueces River record,” he said.

Sure enough, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the all-tackle record for blue catfish on the Nueces River was a 35.85 lb., 41-inch specimen caught by a fellow named Paul Hefner on April 10, 2023.

(By the way, the same Paul Hefner set another record for Lake Corpus Christi three days later, April 13, 2023, with a 90-inch, 207-pound alligator gar. That catch got a lot of attention in the news around South Texas.)

Now, I didn’t see my wife and her brother’s fish firsthand. But judging from the pictures, I believe it would have beat the record, maybe by a lot. Blue cats certainly get much bigger. The Texas state record was a 121.5 lb. blue cat caught in Lake Texoma by Cody Mullennix in 2004.