The Mississippi River doesn't just produce a few world-class fish; anglers can catch nice numbers of fish that would be trophies anywhere else. Here catfish guide James Patterson shows off an average blue cat from the Mississippi near Memphis.

At the Bass Pro Shop's Big Cat Quest Championship, Nov. 3-4, 2007, on the Mississippi River at Memphis, something happened that had even the most hardcore catfish anglers gasping in surprise. Veteran cat men Phil King of Corinth, Mississippi, and Cary Winchester of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, plucked a pair of catfish from "The Father of Waters" the likes of which have never been seen in a catfishing tournament -- and few other places either.

Even the most astute odds makers might have hedged their bets when predicting the outcome of this tournament. The stretch of the Mississippi running along the east edge of Memphis is well known for producing giant blue cats.

The premier example is the former all-tackle, world-record blue cat caught here on Aug. 3, 2001. Around 6:30 p.m. that day, Charles Ashley Jr. of Marion, Arkansas, was catfishing with two friends in the shadow of the Memphis skyline. Ashley was fishing with a medium-weight spinning combo he recently had bought. He baited with a chunk of Hormel Spam (yes, Spam!), cast it out, let it sink to the bottom and set the hook in a 116-pound, 12-ounce blue cat just minutes later. The next day, I certified his fish as a new Arkansas rod-and-reel record, and later it was certified as a world record.

Ashley's fish wasn't the last of the giants either. A catfish larger than the current world record -- a 127-pound blue -- was caught in a net not far downstream from Memphis in May 2002. And on April 18, 2004, Matt Bingham of Memphis caught and released a blue just upstream from Memphis that was 56 inches long with a 36-inch girth. That fish, which undoubtedly exceeded 100 pounds, may still be swimming the river and growing larger with each day.

Several other blues near or exceeding the 100-pound mark have been snatched from the big river in recent decades as well, and the Mississippi gives up its share of huge flatheads and channel cats, too.

Yet even with the best catfish anglers in the world competing on what some have described as "the best trophy catfish river in the nation," no one in their wildest dreams anticipated the historic events that would transpire at the Big Cat Quest Championship.

One For The Money . . .
At midmorning on Day 1 of the tournament, Phil King set the hook in a fish he immediately knew was a cut above average. His teammates, Tim Haynie and Leland Harris, pulled their anchor so they could follow the big catfish and give King a better chance of landing it. The strategy worked. After a 30-minute battle, King brought the gigantic blue cat close enough for Haynie to net.

"When we had it in the boat, I was pretty certain my dream had come true," King said. "After years of trying, I finally had caught a catfish weighing more than 100 pounds."

Three pounds more to be exact, a record weight for a catfish weighed in during a U.S. tournament. Although other teams brought in some very respectable cats as well, King's 103.11-pound blue was enough to put his team in the No. 1 spot at the end of the first day of competition. Their five-fish limit pushed the scale to 163.5 pounds, nearly 46 pounds ahead of second place.