Noodlers recount cave brawl with 98.7 pound flathead, 14 feet down

A nasty thunderstorm packing big wind, rain and dangerous lightning rolled across Lake Tawakoni on the afternoon of June 22. Justin Wright of Kaufman and Drew Moore of Chandler were on the water doing some noodling at the time. The men thought about racing to shore in their jon boat to beat the approaching weather, but chose take shelter beneath a nearby bridge crossing instead.

“The radar indicated the storm was going to miss us, but it didn’t,” White said. “We didn’t realize how bad it was until it got there. All we could do was wait it out.”

It was getting pretty late when the skies calmed, but the two men still had time to do some fishing before darkness fell. They didn’t have to go far to reach their next spot, either. There was a honey hole just beneath a boat, but they had to dive 14 feet beneath the surface to get there.

Moore, 23, described the sweet spot as a big cavern beneath the concrete at the base of the bridge, likely formed by years of turbulence and big catfish using it as spawning den. The rectangular entry is about is about 18 inches tall and six feet across.

“It’s like an 8X8 cereal bowl with a sandy bottom once you’re inside,” he said. “You could probably stand up and do jumping jacks in there. It’s that big.”

The men discovered the cave two weeks earlier while scouting for new places yet to be discovered by a passionate noodling cult that frequents Tawakoni and surrounding lakes during the height of the early summer spawning season.

Sometimes called grappling or just plain ol’ hand fishing, noodling is primitive fishing in its purest form. It involves sticking your hands or feet into underwater washouts, stump cavities, beneath concrete boat ramps or any other place where a big catfish might take refuge to spawn.

Big flathead and blue catfish are extremely territorial and protective of their spawning dens. They will attack anything that invades their space. That’s the idea behind noodling - to provoke the fish into clamping down on a hand or foot so you can yank it out of the spawning den and ultimately wrestle it back to the boat.

White and Moore snatched a pair of 30 pounders out of the cave earlier in the month.

“It’s a spot we knew we had to come back to and check periodically,” Moore said. It definitely had the potential to hold some big ones.”

The anglers’ intuitions were right on the money. Monster in the Dark Both men take their noodling seriously. They don wet suits to protect their skin, wear weight belts to hold them down in the water column and rely on a special Hookah tankless dive system to feed them oxygen on extended dives.

Each angler has a mouth regulator and 100 feet of air hose that connects to a battery-powered compressor that stays in the boat. The regulator/hose clips to the weight belt, so they can always find it should it get dislodged.

Teamwork is super important when it comes to safety and technique. One tiny miscue can get you into serious trouble in an unforgiving environment, or result in the loss of a trophy class fish.

“We’ve been noodling together for about five seasons now, so we pretty much know what the other is thinking and how they’ll react in certain situations,” White said.

That’s a good thing. The two anglers have had run-ins with several big fish, but none to compare with the bruiser flathead they encountered on that fateful Friday afternoon. The brawl started just minutes into the dive.

“We entered the cave shoulder-to-shoulder to try to prevent anything that might be in there from blowing out around us,” White said. “It was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. There is no way to communicate down there. No talking, just mumbling. Everything is done by feel.”

The noodlers estimate they were about six feet inside the cave when they realized it was occupied by a really large fish.

“A hell broke loose,” Moore said. “She met us at the edge of her spawning bed and went to work on us. She would ram us, suck our arms in up to the elbow, roll, shake loose and bite again. Imagine being locked in dark closet with an MMA fighter that you can’t see. It was complete chaos. We took a total butt whipping for about 2 minutes. She tore up the arms on our wet suits. I’ve got teeth in my arms like splinters.”

Eventually, the two men managed to overpower the fish. White said they bear hugged the fat cat from both sides and wrapped their legs around it to gain control.

“We basically hugged each other with her sandwiched between us,” White said. “We were beat up and pretty disoriented at that point from doing flips and turning several circles in the dark wrestling with her. We were able to follow our hoses back to entrance hole and start working our way back to the surface. It was pretty interesting to say the least.”

A World Class Cat White and Moore have noodled multiple fish in the 6080 pound range, but they knew this one was significantly larger than any they had caught before. The fishermen had a scale in the boat and it cracked 100 pounds.

“Grabbing its lower lip was like reaching around a 16-ounce water bottle,” Moore said. “She was thick from head to tail.”

The men contacted Duck Cove Marina and arranged to have the big fish weighed on certified scales. In the meantime, they tethered the world-class cat to a heavy nylon strap, carefully placed it in the boat for transport and treated it with kid gloves all the way.

“We kept her wet and stopped every few minutes to let her swim for about five minutes,” White said. “The last thing we wanted to do was kill that fish. We did everything we could to prevent that. It wouldn’t have been worth it if she had died.”

On the Scale The fat cat registered a whopping 98.7 pounds on certified scales. It measured 56 inches long and had a plump, 44 inch girth. The anglers later released fish over deep water the middle the lake. They claim she swam away full of life.

“That was great to see,” Moore said. “I’m liable to forget some of the 50 and 60 pounders we’ve caught, but I’ll never forget this one. It was truly the fish of a lifetime. Hopefully, she’ll go back to that cave and be over 100 pounds next time we catch her.”

If anyone has ever noodled a bigger flathead and documented the weight on certified scales, I haven’t heard about it. In July 2021, fieldandstream.com reported that Oklahoma noodler Levi Bennett snatched a 58 inch, 106 pounder out of a culvert on an undisclosed East Texas lake. The report said the fisherman chose to release the fish before seeking out a certified scale.

In 2017, a Quinlan-Tawakoni News report stated that Nate Williams of Prague, Oklahoma and Kelly Millsap of Quinland noodled and 85 pound, 2 ounce flathead during a local fishing tournament at Tawakoni. The report said the fish was a new national hand fishing record for organized noodling tournaments.

Jake Norman is the fisheries biologist that oversees Lake Tawakoni for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The biggest hand-caught Texas flathead he is aware of was caught illegally in 1984 at the Old Omen boat ramp at Lake Tyler-East. Hand fishing was not made legal in Texas until 2011.

“As the story goes, a guy was in the water guiding a boat onto the trailer when a big flathead came out from under the ramp and started pounding his leg,” Norman said. “He and another guy caught the fish with their hands and threw it in the back of the pick-up, then claimed they caught it on a trotline. Game wardens heard about it and eventually got the men to confess.”

The fish reportedly weighed 122 pounds, but it is unclear if the weight was certified or not. Norman said there is a life-sized replica of the fat cat at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens.

Aging a Cat So, how old was the 98.7 Tawakoni bruiser? No one knows for certain. The only way to accurately estimate the age of a fish is to examine its otoliths, small bones inside the skull. Fish must be dead to do it.

TPWD fisheries/research biologist David Buckmeier has aged thousands of flathead and blue catfish over the years. He says growth rates are highly variable.

Buckmeier has aged five-pound flatheads that were 3-30 years old and 100-pound blue cats as young as 13. The biologist has found that the biggest fish are typically not the oldest, and that they usually grow faster than most in the population. His best guess is the Tawakoni fish was likely in its late teens or early 20s. ----- Matt Williams is a freelance writer based in Nacogdoches. He can be reached by e-mail, mattwillwrite4u@yahoo. com.