South Carolina Man Shatters State Catfish Record

A South Carolinian has broken the state’s 2018 record for flathead catfish. Patrol Sergeant Joseph Driggers of Mars Bluff caught the 110-plus pound monster cat on a Santee rig while fishing a 40-foot deep back eddy on the Pee Dee River. It crushed the previous record by nearly 30 pounds.

“Me and my two younger brothers decided we’d go catch a couple catfish on the Pee Dee down here in lower Florence County,” Driggers tells F&S. “We were mainly just fishing log jams and little back eddies, just looking for deep holes. It’s extremely low down here due to the drought.”

A Last-Minute Record Breaker

Toward the end of their trip, Driggers and his brothers found a hole they’d never fished next to a train trestle, roughly 25-feet deep, he says. They caught one decent blue cat there before it stopped producing. “We were heading back to the landing, and I spotted an area that I’ve driven past for 10 or 12 years but never fished,” he adds. “I just threw a couple lines out while we were tidying up the boat, and he hit it like a freight train.”

Driggers says the giant catfish swam deep and hugged the bottom after it slammed into this Santee rig. “After 15 minutes of fighting him, I finally got him to come in, and that was pretty much it,” he recalls.

Often called a Santee-Cooper rig, the setup that Driggers was using was pioneered in the mid-1980s around Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie—two famous South Carolina fisheries in their own right. “You use a slide swivel with a plastic tube with a clip on it,” he says. “I was using a 5-ounce pancake weight. That slides down to a bead on the end that goes down to a leader. It holds the bait up, probably 5-to-6-inches off the bottom, and keeps it in the strike zone.”

It was heavy tackle, with a 50-pound leader, Driggers recalls, but he wasn’t expecting to hook a 100-plus-pound fish. “I called some of my friends at [the South Carolina] DNR that I’ve worked with, being in law enforcement, and we went to a local place in Johnsonville called the Skinning Shed to get a round-about weight.”

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The scale at the Skinning Shed read 113 pounds. “But they were using an old cotton scale,” Driggers says. “The DNR guys were like, ‘Yeah, we need to hurry up and find a certified scale.” Driggers says he met two SCDNR fisheries biologist at the Lands End Marina Georgetown, and they recored the flathead’s official weight at 113.7 pounds.

Paul Daniels of Hanahan, SC caught the previous South Carolina record for flathead catfish. It weighed close to 90 pounds. For scale, the International Gamefish Association’s all-tackle world record, caught in Oklahoma in 1998, weighed 128 pounds even.

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