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Mick Brown lands monster 'moggie' on his last catfish session of the season...

With the summer slipping by, I should have been preparing my pike and zander tackle, but I couldn’t get catfish out of my head. On September 26^th, I felt it was still plenty warm enough to have just one more catfish session before I started sorting out the herrings and trebles. With the van loaded up, I headed for one last crack at a water I really wanted to get a result from.

The water was only stocked with four cats, about seven or eight years ago. They were legal fish and I am told, all of similar size in the low twenties. In a fairly large water, I didn’t really expect to catch one easily. A couple of attempts in previous seasons had resulted in just two kittens, of three or four pounds, as they had obviously bred in there. This didn’t bother me too much as I would fish a heavy feeder rod for tench and bream during the daytime and really enjoyed it too. Keeping bait going into the swim, loads of pellets and ground bait, I saw as a major advantage of doing so.

It’s not clear how many of the cats had been caught, but from the information I had, it seemed to me that probably three of them had been caught in the last two seasons, and they had obviously piled on the weight, with the odd ones recorded by carp anglers, ranging from mid thirties to over fifty pounds. Then I heard the staggering news that one of the carp anglers had banked one at sixty two pounds. Purely by coincidence, he was field testing the Dynamite spicy chicken boilie!

I had a couple of goes on the spicy chicken boilie and also on the 21mm halibut pellets, which had both caught for me catfish over fifty pounds from other waters, so I was more than confident in them. It was just a matter of time, but how long? With just four cats to go at, my chances were slim.

On another water I had recently had a breakthrough experimenting with flavours. Knowing that catfish love eels, I made up my own flavour from liquidised eels and used it to soak pellets, both as feed and hook baits. The only problem was that the mix had to be used straight away because it soon went stale and they wouldn’t touch it. With my head buzzing with confidence, I couldn’t get to this water quick enough, to see whether it would work there.

To hedge my bets, I put one rod out with three 20 mm spicy chicken boilies, and one with three halibut pellets. The third rig was baited with two 21mm halibut pellets soaked in my eel extract, and tipped with a chunk of eel about the size of a pellet.

No-one else was on the lake for the night, and I knew this would increase my chances. If I baited heavily there would be only one bed of bait for the cats to find. Of course, the carp and bream would find it too, but there’s not much you can do about that. I don’t see it as a problem as I am sure any feeding frenzy by other species is soon noticed by the cats, which will push their way in and take what they want. With this in mind, I put in five kilos of eel soaked pellets just before dusk, regularly topping up the swim by catapult every hour or so.

It was a dark, still and quiet night and nothing happened until after midnight. At least I wasn’t being bothered by bream and carp. Then the eel bait rod was away, a slow determined run. I wound into a heavy fish which swam towards me. I caught up with it and it felt heavy, then the hook pulled. It could have been anything really.

Then it happened, just before daylight, the eel bait rod was away again with a screaming run. I have caught a lot of big catfish in UK waters, but this was a fight that topped them all. Only a regular catfish angler would know what I went through, and for twenty minutes that cat never stopped tugging and running. With an island close by, lily beds and a sunken tree snag, I just had to keep in control and I did reach a point where I thought I had finally been beaten. When it did go in the net, I knew it was massive, but I was overcome with a terrific headache like I’d never had before, and I spent the next hour just sitting in the margin, in soaking wet cloths, holding the net until I felt a bit better.

I knew I needed a bit of help, and phoned a friend who came down and helped me weigh it and did a couple of photos in the early morning sunlight. At 67lb 4oz, I had beaten my previous best of 65lb 8oz and it was the seventh UK fish I had landed weighing over 60lb.

Discussion ensued as to whether it was the 62 pounder. At the moment we are not sure whether it was the one that had never been landed, but it was certainly unmarked and unblemished, with no indication that it had ever been caught before.

I’d like to say I’ve now got catfish out of my system for a bit - I haven’t, but with great reluctance, I am now tearing myself away to concentrate on pike and zander fishing. I’ve always thought that there is a great crossover in methods and baits for different predator species, and already I am starting to make progress in improving my pike and zander rigs and baits from what I have learnt through fishing for cats this summer. Later on in the season, I hope to report some developments.