Catfish angler lands record drum; rod nearly pulled from holder

The record-breaking drum struck so ferociously that it nearly pulled the rod from its holder.

John Gibson, who was fishing in a catfish tournament on the Kanawha River on April 24, told Metro News that he assumed he had hooked a massive catfish as line spun from his reel at an alarming rate.

But Gibson eventually turned the fish’s head and, after a 20-minute fight, landed a freshwater drum that would tip a certified scale at 27.88 pounds, breaking a state record (27 pounds) that had stood since 1989.

The West Virginia Department of Natural Resources announced the record catch last week.

Gibson told Metro News that he and his partner, Terry Legg, had stopped to fish over a bank after noticing a giant mark on their sonar unit.

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Gibson pinned a large piece of shad to his hook and cast over the bank and set his rod in the holder. “And within 10 minutes that rod took off,” Gibson recalled. “It almost pulled the rod out of the rod holder.”

Gibson placed the fish in the boat’s live well while Legg used his phone to look up the state record. On the boat the drum weighed 28.42 pounds; the anglers kept it in the well as they continued fishing for catfish.

At the dock the fish weighed 28.17 pounds. But a state DNR biologist arrived 30 minutes later and certified the weight at 27.88 pounds.

For the sake of comparison, the all-tackle world record for freshwater drum stands at 54 pounds, 8 ounces. That fish was caught at Tennessee’s Nickjack Lake in 1972.