'We're Gonna Need A Bigger Net': Angler Reels In Giant Catfish On Lake Of The Ozarks

Lake of the Ozarks is known for some big fish tales. (Like this one, from the Big Bass Bash.) Paul McWilliams' Lake of the Ozarks fish tale involves an incredibly big catfish, caught off his dock!

McWilliams' home sits at the 8MM. And this spring, he started suspecting he had an especially large underwater neighbor after something snapped several stout fishing lines.

“I tried to attach the jig to the dock with a 60-pound braid,” he said. “But one night a fish came by and ripped out the jig and broke the braid that connected the jig to the dock." His friends said he must have Jaws living under the dock. "So I tried it again. I put it on a shock cord in the braid that I had it hooked to the dock with, and it broke that. So I said ‘What the heck, we're gonna go with a boat fender and use a ski rope to attach it to the dock and use 125-pound nylon down to the hook.’”

After rigging the line and jig, McWilliams caught a 10-pound catfish. With that, he thought he’d solved the mystery of the snapped lines. Then he got a call from his son-in-law, Mike Hampton.

“My son-in-law went down to the dock early in the morning, and he phones me and he says 'Paul, you gotta get down here. I don't know what you got on here but it's pulling the boat fender under water.'"

McWilliams went down to the dock and helped Hampton pull in a monster. The catfish was so massive, they couldn’t even weigh it.

“I pulled it up, got the fish up to where we could see a little bit of it. And he goes, ‘We're gonna need a bigger net,’” McWilliams said. “There's just no way so we both had to reach in there and just manhandle it up onto the dock. And it was a female and full of eggs so we didn't want to keep it out too long. So I grabbed my scale, put the fish on the scale and it bottomed out the scale. And so Mike says and it's 50ish easy,”

This mama catfish didn’t come out of the Lake easily.

“It felt heavy. It was big and it was very, very lively. I mean, it was fighting. It didn't want to come out. And I've never tried to handle a catfish that large, it was the largest catfish I've ever seen, up close and personal. But what surprised me was how hard it could bite. I mean, it wasn't hurting my hand but it was squeezing my hand. It was more than a firm handshake. It had a lot of bite pressure,” McWilliams recalled.

McWilliams has been fishing for more than 60 years and has been vacationing at Lake of the Ozarks for years, although he only recently made the Lake his full-time home.

“We sold our place in Florida and bought a place on the Lake so we could be closer to family,” McWilliams said. “I'm used to saltwater fishing and I’m still kind of getting used to freshwater fishing. I'd made a little fun of it, saying 'Ah, I want a big fish, you know we get big fish when we’re saltwater fishing.' Well, I sure got a big fish this time.”