Just fishin’ in the dark…
According to For The Win, a Tennessee fisherman was on “kind of a date” with his wife on Saturday, when the casual date night turned into the catch of his lifetime.
Micka Burkhart was fishing on the Cumberland River, when he reeled in a massive 118-pound, 7-ounce blue catfish in front of his wife, Amy, which is currently a pending state-record blue catfish.
The fish was weighed in front of a number of witnesses, including a state biologist, and was later released.
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency shared and confirmed in a Facebook post on Sunday:
“The blue cat will be a new Tennessee record pending verification and certification.”
The previous state record had held on strong for nearly 25 years, previously set at 112 pounds back in 1998, which was also caught on the Cumberland River.
Burkhart expressed his excitement for the catch to News 9, and how he was glad he got to share it with his wife:
“We don’t get to fish together a whole lot (so) this was kind of like a date.
In fact, that morning she made a joke saying, ‘Every time we go on a date, somehow or another your friends get involved.’ I told her, ‘Nope, today it’s just you and me on the river.'”
Burkhart used a 30-pound-test line and used skipjack shad as bait, and the blue catfish was a whopping 54 inches with a girth of 41 inches.
The world record currently sits at 143 pounds, and was caught in 2011 by Richard Nicholas Anderson at Kerr Lake in Virginia.
I’d say it was a successful date.
