Huge Catfish Elusive 2nd Time Around

Wearing a “lucky duck” button on his cap during a recent fishing expedition, Wayne Chappell steers his 14-foot Boston Whaler toward a weed-choked cove at Lake Casitas. The 72-year-old Ojai barber is on the prowl for the Mother of All Catfish, a bewhiskered behemoth as large as a child, with a perpetual scowl and a facial scar from a previous encounter with Chappell.

Unlike other undersea creatures--from Old Bucketmouth to the Loch Ness Monster--the Mother of All Catfish isn’t a myth, the product of a fisherman’s wishful thinking. Chappell has not only seen it, but he actually pulled it from the cold, dark water last November. At 42 pounds, it was the biggest fish ever caught at Casitas.

Although catfish usually wind up in his skillet, Chappell spared the life of his trophy catch because it was full of eggs and ready to spawn. After taking the Mother of All Catfish home to photograph and show his friends, Chappell released it into the lake, where it cruises today, playing Moby Dick to Chappell’s Captain Ahab.

Monitoring his Humminbird sonar, Chappell cuts the outboard motor when an incessant beeping sound alerts him to large red blips swimming from left to right on the screen. The Mother of All Catfish accompanied by a squadron of buff offspring?

“Drop anchor,” Chappell instructs his longtime fishing companion Ed Baumgart, a World World II Navy veteran and retired Lake Casitas ranger. The sonar beeps like a broken microwave and the red blips pick up the pace. “Look at all them dudes,” Chappell says. “We’re gonna get us some catfish.”

A lot of freshwater fishermen probably don’t understand Chappell’s enthusiasm for the humble catfish. Besides being perhaps the homeliest creature in the lake, the catfish lacks the charisma of largemouth bass and the mystic appeal of rainbow trout.

Fishermen usually mock it as a bottom-dwelling scavenger, deriding its ability to put up a good fight. But Chappell disagrees.

“It may be ugly and it may not jump out of the water like a bass,” Chappell says, “but it’s just as hard to get in the boat. And it tastes delicious. I call it Lake Casitas lobster.”

Son of an Arkansas chicken rancher, Chappell has been fishing for catfish most of his life, refining his technique over the years. Although catfish fishing seemingly doesn’t involve much skill--you basically cast your bait and let the fish find it--an understanding of catfish habits and physiology is essential.

“Catfish have large mouths but small throats,” Chappell says. “When a catfish takes the bait, he will run with it and then stop, start to swallow and then run some more. When he stops for the third time, he’s got it in his throat. That’s when you set the hook.”

Chappell uses a medium-weight rod and 10-pound test line, which was strong enough to catch the 42-pounder. Until he sets the hook, he keeps the bale open on his reel so the fish can run with the bait in its mouth. The pressure on the drag is kept loose to prevent the line from breaking. When reeling in, he takes his time, letting the fish tire itself out.

“Nine out of 10 people who hook a big catfish will lose it because they get excited and try to reel it in too fast,” Chappell says.

Before he hooked the Mother of All Catfish last November, Chappell had caught a couple of 25-pound specimens at Casitas “and a lot of 10-to-15 pounders,” he says. About three years ago, Chappell, Baumgart and Darrel Bowyer landed 17 catfish weighing a total of 150 pounds, satisfying their appetites but not their imaginations.

According to local lore, monster catfish inhabited the lake. Divers sent out to retrieve lost outboards have reported seeing man-size catfish. And a few years ago, a 51-pound dead catfish--the Father of All Catfish?--washed up to shore, its demise attributed to the metal stringer stuck in its throat. This was confirmation: The big one was out there.

But catfish don’t get to be big ones by being stupid. In living to be from 15 to 18 years old, Chappell’s catfish had learned how to elude fishermen. To catch the wily critter, Chappell had to be lucky.

It was after 11 a.m. on that November day when Chappell guided his boat into a small cove on the lake.

After throwing their lines toward the weeds along the shore, Chappell, Bowyer and Baumgart didn’t get a nibble, so Chappell slid a fresh piece of mackerel onto his hook and casually flipped his line into open water 40 or 50 feet deep. He figures the bait plunged directly into the catfish’s waiting jaws.

“I evidently threw it right into her mouth,” he says. “It was a perfect shot.”

The catfish then reacted predictably, running for about 75 feet, stopping, running another 75 feet, stopping. When his line began jerking back and forth, Chappell closed his bale and set the hook. He realized right away that this wasn’t the runt of the litter.

“I knew she was big, but not that big,” Chappell says.

The catfish made several runs, went around the boat twice and tried to swim for the protection of a submerged tree. After about 15 minutes, Chappell finally maneuvered the fish to the side of the boat, where the three fishermen saw its bulk for the first time.

Bowyer slipped a net over the fish but it broke through the netting. He then reached down and grabbed the fish by its gills and Baumgart took hold of its tail and they wrestled it into the boat. As the 4-foot-2 creature flopped madly, Chappell finally ran out of adrenaline, his “knees got weak and I had to sit down,” he says.

Regaining his strength, Chappell took his knife and went to cut out the hook, but it was already dislodged. That’s when Chappell noticed a tear at the right corner of the fish’s mouth.

The fish hadn’t swallowed the hook but had merely impaled itself, a freak accident. Experience tells Chappell that the powerful fish should have ripped the hook loose during its struggle in the water, but it didn’t.

“There’s a lot of luck in catching fish,” he says.

Indeed, when Chappell and Baumgart went searching for the Mother of All Catfish recently, they were skunked. After three hours, the only creature to join them in the boat was a crawdad, which bit Chappell’s hand. But what about all those red blips on sonar, thrashing like torpedoes?

“The fish finder will locate fish,” Chappell says, “but it won’t catch them.”