Landing This 8-Foot Catfish, Possibly the Largest Ever Caught in the UK, Was Like ‘Walking 12 German Shepherds’ at Once

Outdoor Life

A British angler caught what could be the largest catfish ever recorded in the United Kingdom in September. The big catfish weighed 150 pounds and measured more than 8 feet long, according to a statement posted Monday by the Chigboro Fisheries Facebook page.

The angler, Shaun Ing, and his wife, Chloe Ing, are regulars and bailiffs (like park monitors) at Chigboro, a pay-lake complex and resort outside London. Ing caught the cat using 15-pound test and a baited size 6 hook after more than an hour and a half of “graft and knowing how to play big fish.” (“Graft” is British slang for hard work. It’s unclear what bait Ing used to catch the cat, just that he used a “yellow hookbait.”)

“There was no stopping it — [the fish] was stripping line like you wouldn’t believe,” Ing, 34, told the BBC. “I used to have a German shepherd – it was like walking 12 of them at once.”

The BBC reported that Ing was fishing with his wife, Chloe Ing, and friends. Their Chinese takeout arrived just as he hooked up, and it sat uneaten while he fought the fish.

“Even an hour into the fight, the fish was still taking line and we were all wondering, ‘When is this going to end?’” he told the news outlet. “They were looking at their watches thinking,‘Are we still going to be here in the morning doing this?’”

When Ing finally muscled the catfish to shore, he realized it was too big for the net. His buddies managed to find some weight slings, but the fish’s sheer size still posed a problem.

“Once we had the cat resting in the slings, we wondered how on earth we were going to unhook adnd weigh the beast, all the while knowing it could be close to, if not bigger than, the British record,” Ing told Angling Times. The anglers ended up using “a human body bag” (a prop for Halloween events) to wrangle the cat. “We tried to weigh the catfish, but the first tripod gave out as the hook straightened under the weight.”

Eventually they managed to get a weight of 164.1 pounds, which included the weight of the sling. Once the catfish was released, they subtracted the sling to calculate 150 pounds on the nose.

While the catch won’t be eligible for the International Game Fish Association recordbooks, Ing says he’s hopeful it will become a new UK record. If the catch is certified by the British Record Fish Committee for rod-caught fish, the Wels catfish would top the 143 pound 14 oz catfish caught at the same fishery last year by Darren Reitz.

The Ings are helping to set up a new catfish lake on the property, and noted that the big catfish was a distinct fish from the 143-pounder caught at the complex earlier last year. It’s not immediately clear if this is because fish at the complex are tagged, or if the previous fish was landed and/or released in another pond. Facebook posts indicate that Ing’s fish was caught from a carp impoundment, and subsequently released into a different pond.

“This is why you never mix cats and carp into a lake an hour and half on the wrong gear (not the chap who caught its fault),” wrote one commenter. “Glad its been moved into the new lake.”

The BRFC classifies catfish, which are not native to the UK, as coarse fish. (Curiously, pike and perch are also considered coarse fish by the organization.)

Wels catfish are notorious for their ability to grow to immense sizes across Europe. The all-tackle world-record Wels catfish was pulled from Italy’s legendary River Po in 2010. That fish weighed 297 pounds 9 ounces, and taped out at about 8 feet long. In June 2023, an angler caught another gargantuan Wels from the same river, which set a length record at roughly 9 feet. That fish was released without being weighed (and if you look at the pics, you can understand why), though it likely would’ve outstripped the 2010 world-record holder.

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Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/fishing/giant-record-catfish-united-kingdom/