Talk About Fish Stories, Here’s a Real Whopper

Raymond Janssen had an idea for a pleasant Sunday. He would take David, his 22-year-old son, to San Vicente Reservoir to fish. They would pack a lunch and listen on the radio to the Chargers play Denver. Nice.

They might even catch a fish or two.

Yes, this is a fish story, but not that kind of fish story. On an afternoon when the Chargers could not even get the Broncos on a hook and the Angels could not reel in Boston, Ray Janssen made the biggest catch in the history of San Diego County’s freshwater lakes.

Janssen, a civilian security officer with the Navy, did not venture from his home in El Cajon with any kind of records in mind. He had been fishing for 25 years and caught a few fish weighing maybe nine or 10 pounds. That’s big enough to have a few folks over for dinner, but hardly the stuff to stuff and hang over the fireplace.

“I’ve been very, very unlucky,” he said, sounding a little bit like Gene Mauch. “I’ve lost a lot of big ones.”

He and David lost a few fish and caught a few fish Sunday.

It was a good day . . . and about to get a whole lot better.

Actually, Janssen sensed that something rather large was under the boat. He kept getting these strikes that would bend his pole in two and send a rapid rush of adrenalin through his system. However, the pole would straighten and he would reel in the line and both the mackerel and the hook would be gone. Theorizing that he was out to catch fish, not feed them, he switched to a stronger hook.

Suddenly . . .

The line shot from the reel and the pole bent like he was trying to lift the Titanic.

“My God,” he thought, “I’ve either got something awfully big or I’ve caught someone’s motor.”

The battle was on. Half the line in the reel was gone, almost instantly. He set the drag as carefully as he could in those frantic early moments, too loose and the line would fly off the reel, too tight and the line would break.

He got it right.

Janssen would have his way for a while and the fish would have its way for a while. This was a delicious little drama. Hemingway should have been there. The battle went on for an hour, and boaters started gathering on the fringes to watch.

The Janssens were fishing from one of those dilapidated rental boats. They had nothing more sophisticated than their radio, and that was being forgotten. Another boat came along, a bass boat equipped with computerized radar. Janssen and son accepted an invitation to board, abandoning lunch, radio and rental boat.

“The boat had equipment for taking pictures of the bottom,” Janssen recalled. “The printouts showed three trees and a rock on the bottom. We started to slowly back away toward the deep water at the center of the lake.”

The idea, of course, was to keep the fish from tangling the line. Fishermen consider their quarry to be most worthy and intelligent opponents, giving them credit for treachery beyond what piscatorial brains can likely conjure.

Without commenting on the mental capabilities of this particular fish, it can be said that it was physically strong. When the motor was killed in the center of the lake, the fish simply towed the boat wherever it pleased.

Another hour passed. Finally, in clear water over a sandy bottom, Raymond Janssen caught sight of his opponent.

He gasped.

There he stood with a pole in his hand and a net at his side, and what he probably needed was a harpoon or maybe a torpedo. This had to be a cousin of the Loch Ness monster.

This was a blue catfish. That was no surprise to Janssen. That’s what he expected. Either that or Jaws.

One attempt was made to net him, and the net broke. Finally, he was aboard. He had to be covered with net, someone standing on each side to keep him down.

This one was not ready to give up the fight.

More on that later.

The blue would later be weighed at 46 pounds and measured at 41 1/2 inches in length and 28 inches in girth. The previous record for the county was 45 pounds 13 ounces, set last year at San Vicente by Ron Huffman of Lakeside.

It took Ray Janssen more than two hours but less than three to land this fish. No one knows precisely because everything was so hectic. It seemed that time was both standing still and flying.

And now he had to find some place to store this behemoth late on a Sunday afternoon. He tried all the neighbors, and no one had a freezer large enough. Too bad William Perry didn’t live in the neighborhood.

Janssen decided he would put his guest to bed in the bathtub, encasing him in 150 pounds of ice.

Both exhausted and excited, Janssen went to sleep. However, his sleep was interrupted in the middle of the night by loud banging. Dazed, Janssen’s first thought was of a burglary at a neighbor’s house a few nights earlier.

“That’s all I could think of,” he said. “I grabbed a .38 pistol and started looking around. Finally, I realized the sound was coming from the bathroom. I banged on the door and said, ‘OK, come on out.’ ”

The blue would have obliged, but he was too busy scattering 150 pounds of ice around the room. He had enough kick left to thrash and trash a bathroom 12 hours after he had been hauled from the lake.

“Imagine,” Raymond Janssen said later, “if I had dialed 911 and they’d gotten to the house to find the ‘burglar’ was a catfish. . . .”

Now that would have been a fish story to tell son David’s children.

“Yep,” he could say. “You heard it right. Grandpa once caught a fish so big it was arrested.”