19-year-old Cary man catches 40-pound catfish in Fox River

To Travis Witkins, it felt as if there was a brick at the end of his line.

The 19-year-old Cary native reeled in what he estimates was at least a 40-pound flathead catfish Sunday night along the Fox River near Broken Oar Marina Bar & Grill in Port Barrington.

The catfish measured 39 inches long and 28 inches around the stomach. Witkins had misplaced his scale. His buddy’s scale maxed out at 35 pounds and the monster fish had no problem reaching that mark.

“Almost broke the scale,” Witkins recalled with a laugh.

Based on the measurements and after talking with other fishermen he knows, Witkins is pretty confident it was at least 40 pounds.

The catch came about 10:30 p.m. Sunday after three quiet hours fishing from his grandfather's dock about a mile upstream from the Broken Oar. Witkins almost always goes after large flathead catfish and caught a 34-pounder on the Fox River last year.

He usually uses hand-sized bluegills to catch catfish. On Sunday, he and his friends ran out of bait. Witkins caught a small bluegill – what he called “the smallest bait we could have [used]” – and stuck it on the end of the line. That’s what caught the 40-pound catfish.

“We were rebaiting one of our poles and I was standing next to one that just started slowly peeling out line,” Witkins said. “I picked it up and we waited a solid five minutes before I decided that it was probably a fish. It almost unspooled my entire reel.”

It took awhile to reel the fish to the dock.

“He did not want to stop fighting,” Witkins said. Once it was near the dock, Witkins knew he needed to try to beach the fish because it was so heavy. He ended up wading through the water 60 or 70 feet from the dock to drag him ashore.

“It was loads of fun the whole time, but I was freaking out,” Witkins said. “Once we saw the first sign that he was a big fish, when he first popped up to the surface, everyone was freaking out. We all knew the second that thing hit water that that was a big fish.”

Witkins, a 2017 Cary-Grove graduate, studies civil engineering at Western Michigan University. Prior to this weekend, it had been a pretty slow season. On Saturday, he reeled in a 24-pound catfish, and then one day later he pulled in his new personal best.