Lunker Could Be a Record

The students were impressed by the photo of a 15-pound channel catfish Ronson Smothers caught during a recent trip. But then the teacher broke out a picture of the 89.6-pound catfish he’d tangled with last Saturday night at Irvine Lake.

Their jaws dropped.

“It was bigger than any of the kids, I’ll tell you that,” Smothers said of the whiskered giant and how it measured up against his fourth- and fifth-graders at Figueroa Street Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles. “I spent an hour teaching them math with that fish--having them guess its size, stuff like that.”

He no doubt also boasted of the angling skills necessary to conquer such a determined beast, one that dragged him around the lake for nearly two hours in the dark, at one point wrapping the line around the boat’s propeller.

Despite the chaos, Smothers and companion Conrad Carey managed to raise the motor and free the line, and eventually net the enormous head of the fish and wrestle it into the boat.

Landing in their laps was a slithering slug of a catfish that will probably land Smothers in the state record book. His catch eclipses that in 1997 of an 85.1-pound blue catfish caught at Lower Otay Reservoir in San Diego County by Chula Vista’s Floyd Talmadge.

Smothers caught his beauty--if any catfish can be called that--on 15-pound-test monofilament and a chunk of mackerel. For International Game Fish Assn. consideration, his catch would fall under the 16-pound-test line category, and that record is safe: a 101-pounder hauled from the Osage River in Missouri in 1994. The all-tackle world record is a 111-pound blue catfish caught in Wheeler Reservoir on the Tennessee River in Alabama in 1996.

“I’ve caught everything from trout in streams to marlin in Cabo,” Smothers said. “But this rates No. 1 with me. It’s not the biggest fish I ever caught, but it’s the biggest thing I ever pulled out of a lake.”

And it was one heck of a visual aid.