Eight years ago today…

On a business trip this week to Denison, Texas. That got me thinking about nearby Lake Texoma and Splash. You remember the story right?

So, before Tim Pruitt landed his 124 lb Blue Catfish near Alton (I think around 2005), and the recent 143 lb Virginia cat, Cody Mullenix managed to land a world record 121 lb Blue Cat fishing at Lake Texoma on January 16, 2004.

I think that Late Texoma catfish was a pretty significant achievement in that Cody landed his beast fishing from shore. Greater mobility is always a huge advantage when targeting top end fish. There might be advantages to landing big fish from a boat as well (for example, in open water one could pull anchor if necessary).

Cody guides now and has been featured in several of the streaming videos Jeff Williams did for Team Catfish. Looks like he’s still a dedicated and tenacious catman, I think he’s placed well in some of the catfish tournaments. I don’t think that record catch was a fluke by any means.

Cheers Cody!!!

Using the “wayback machine” at Archive.org I dug up Tim Scott’s artice from the old Procats site. There was a nice article later that detailed the bank fishing strategies of Cody and his pals.

It helps if you click “impatient?” on the page..

Article (text version)

You can navigate some of the cached pages from the original article with pictures using this link…

Original article

EVERY time I hear the word “splash” I think of Cody’s record and from shore.

Although I haven’t ever met or talked to him, I have talked to folks that do know him and have fished with him.

He’s one of the true cat fishing guys (guides) that wears a white hat!

Thought I read that’s still the Texas record cat.

Yeah, lots of people got to visit Splash at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center before he (she?) died. When that happened, they even ran some obituary articles for the fish.

Now that I think about it, there was a former record blue catfish that was caught from the Tennessee River by a shore fisherman also. I want to say it was in high-water below one of the TVA dams somewhere.

One of those first Catfish Insider magazines had a nice write up about the angler who caught it fishing with his daughter.

Interesting, both of those were landed on heavy spinning tackle.