West Virginia angler Michael Ramey lives a stone’s throw away from some of the best catfish water in the state. His home in Poca is only a two-minute drive from a boat ramp on the Kanawha River, and just 45 minutes from its confluence with the Ohio River.
On May 9, Ramey trailered his boat down to the Ohio to fish a local tournament held by the Ohio Hills Catfish Club. He fishes these derbies all the time, but with less than ideal river conditions, he needed a little convincing from his buddy Tyler McCoy, and McCoy’s father-in-law Mark Taylor.
“They started catfishing with me last year. And we had an outstanding night in that same pool of water during last year’s tournament, so they wanted to fish it this year,” Ramey says. “The water was not ideal — the river was gonna be dropping hard, and I really didn’t want to fish the tournament. But they talked me into it.”
After launching his G3 Sportsman at 7 a.m. along with the other competitors, Ramey headed straight to a creek mouth he likes to fish. They fished for an hour or so without a bite. Then he noticed a current break in the middle of the river. Looking at his sonar, he scanned across the rifer and saw some fish holding there. Ramey repositioned the boat and dropped anchor.
Using stout rods with 100-pound braid and heavy sinkers, the anglers casted out pegged float rigs with cut bait on sharp circle hooks. It didn’t take long for Ramey’s bobber to go under, and when he first came tight to the fish, he thought it was a flathead.
“Them blues they’ll roll real bad, and they’ll thrash around when you’re fighting ‘em. But he stayed down the whole time,” Ramey tells Outdoor Life. “It was a good fight, too, in that strong current.”
The battle lasted around 10 minutes. When Ramey got the fish to the surface, he saw it was a monster blue cat.
“As soon as we caught it, I told my buddies, ‘I’m pretty sure we just broke 70 pounds,’” says Ramey. He knew the standing state record was just shy of that, at 69.45 pounds, and he called a buddy who was on the water and had a scale in his boat. “He came right away and jumped in the boat, and after we weighed it, he’s like, ‘Man, you gotta call the DNR. I think you got it.’”
Ramey contacted a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia DNR, who offered to meet them back at the boat ramp right away. By that point, the river had already started dropping and the bite had slacked off. So, Ramey loaded the catfish into the big live well in his boat, and headed back to the ramp, where they put the fish on the biologist’s certified scale. They got an official weight of 71 pounds. Since it was a catch-and-release tournament, Ramey let the big catfish go and watched it swim back into the Ohio River.
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“We went back to fishing but the bite just shut down completely on us,” Ramey says. “We still took second place with that one fish, and it was a 5-fish limit tournament. So we won’t complain.”
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