‘He is a monster’: Mississippi man catches mega catfish

A lifelong fisherman in Mississippi has smashed a state document after catching a “monster” catfish weighing in at 131lbs (59.4-kilogram).

The Mississippi Division of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks stated Eugene Cronley, of Brandon, caught the blue catfish on 7 April within the Mississippi River close to Natchez.

“I’ve been catfishing all my life and I by no means dreamed of one thing like this,” Cronley advised the Clarion Ledger.

He stated he used a rod and reel with skipjack herring as bait and that it took him 40 minutes to catch the fish.

In keeping with Cronley, the wrestle with the fish started 5 minutes after his bait entered the water.

“We needed to untie the boat and float down the river,” Cronley advised the Clarion Ledger. “I couldn’t transfer him. I’d pull on him and absorb a foot of line and he’d pull and take 10 ft. I simply sat there like I used to be hung up.”

“It’s really a fish of a lifetime,” he stated, including, “He’s a monster.”

Due to its sheer dimension, Cronley needed to take the fish to Van’s Deer Processing and Sporting Items in Rankin County, Mississippi, which had an authorized scale massive sufficient to weigh the fish.

The division stated Cronley’s fish broke the earlier rod-and-reel document of a 95-pound (43.1-kilogram) fish caught in 2009. It’s additionally bigger than the 101-pound (45.8-kilogram) blue catfish caught by a workforce of two folks in 1997. Each of these fish have been additionally caught within the Mississippi River close to Natchez.

Cronley was slightly greater than 10lbs shy of the world-record catch for a blue catfish, which was set in 2011 when a 143-pound (64.9-kilogram) behemoth was reeled in from a Virginia lake, in line with the Worldwide Recreation Fish Affiliation.

Cronley stated his fish was 56.6 inches (1.4 meters) lengthy with a girth of 41 inches (1.04 meters).

In keeping with the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, blue catfish normally develop as much as two ft or much less. In uncommon circumstances, they’ll exceed 5ft and 100lbs.