Nobody planted blue catfish in the James River on purpose. They got there in the seventies by way of the Rappahannock and the York, where Virginia stocked them as a game fish, and they have spent the decades since eating everything below the fall line at Richmond and growing to the size of a middle schooler. There are hundred pound fish in that river. My cousin Ronnie has been trying to catch one for eleven years and will tell you the score is currently a hundred pounds to zero.
The method is unromantic. You net gizzard shad at dawn with a cast net off the rocks, cut them into steaks the size of a deck of cards, and anchor in the channel on the falling tide with four heavy rods in holders and a circle hook in each shad. Then you wait. Ronnie waits with the concentration of a man watching a pot. The river below Richmond is wide and brown and slow, the old tobacco warehouses on one bank and a heron on every snag, and the tide does all the work.
In September the water is still warm and the big fish are deep. Our first two bites were channel cats, six and eight pounds, and Ronnie put them in the cooler with the look of a man accepting change from a hundred. The third rod bent over so far the tip touched the water and stayed there. He picked it up, leaned back, and nothing moved. That is what a big blue does. It does not run, it simply declines to be part of your plan.
It took twenty-five minutes and two circles of the boat to get it to the surface. When it came up it was gray and enormous and had a head like a five gallon bucket, and we both said the word hundred at the same time. The scale said forty-eight. Ronnie held it for a photo, said something quiet to it, and put it back, because the big ones are old and full of mercury and better in the river than on a plate. The eight pounder, on the other hand, was very good fried.
On the drive home he said the score was now a hundred to forty-eight, which is not how scores work. I did not correct him. He is closer than he has ever been, and there are eleven more years in that river easy.
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