A Tennessee angler on Saturday landed a pending state-record blue catfish while enjoying ‘kind of a date’ with his wife.
The 118-pound, 7-ounce catfish was reeled from the Cumberland River by Micka Burkhart, who was fishing with his wife, Amy. The fish was weighed in front of witnesses, including a state biologist, and released.
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“The blue cat will be a new Tennessee record pending verification and certification,” The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency boasted Sunday on Facebook.
The current record, 112 pounds, was set in 1998, also on the Cumberland River.
Burkhart, in reference to Amy, told News 9: “We don’t get to fish together a whole lot [so] this was kind of like a date. In fact, that morning she made a joke saying, ‘Every time we go on a date, somehow or another your friends get involved.’ I told her, ‘Nope, today it’s just you and me on the river.’ ”
Burkhart was fishing with 30-pound-test line and using skipjack shad for bait. The catfish, kept in a live-well during his search for a certified scale, measured 54 inches with a girth of 41 inches.
For comparison, the world record for blue catfish stands at 143 pounds. That catch was made in 2011 by Richard Nicholas Anderson at Kerr Lake in Virginia.