Roxborough Man's Fish Breaks State Record

ROXBOROUGH, PHILADELPHIA — It's official: Roxborough's Jonathan Pierce is the new record holder for the largest flathead catfish caught in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission certified Piece's new state record flathead catfish recently after he landed the massive fish on May 24 in the Schuylkill River in East Falls.

After catching the fish, Pierce had it weighed at Blue Marsh Outdoors in Berks County.

It was officially recorded as weighing 56 pounds, 3 ounces. It was 50 inches long with a girth of 28.875 inches, but Pennsylvania state record fish are judged only by weight, and must exceed the previous record by at least two ounces. The previous record fish was caught in April 2019 in the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. That fish weighed 50 pounds, 7-ounce.

After weighing the fish, Pierce returned the flathead catfish alive to the Schuylkill River.

"The best way to describe it is like a torpedo," said Pierce, who was accompanied by his girlfriend, Angelina Wilson, who witnessed the catch. "In all the years I've been fishing for flatheads, the fish did something I had never seen. It surfaced, and then ran away from me into a pile of rocks and just stuck there. It was panic mode."

According to officials, the 34-year-old Pierce baited a brown trout head onto an 8/0 circle hook and cast his heavy duty, 10-foot, 6-inch surf rod lined with 50-pound braided fishing line and 20-foot, 60-pound test monofilament leader into approximately 12 feet of water. The soon-to-be-record catch occurred at approximately 8:30 p.m.

After roughly three minutes of being unable to move the fish from the rockpile, Pierce eased tension on his rod and released several feet of slack from his line, hoping the fish would believe it had been freed.

"It worked and the catfish started swimming again," recalled Pierce.

After a five-minute fight, Pierce landed the catfish with Wilson helping to net the fish and lift it onto the river wall.

"My previous biggest catch was 37 pounds and this one made that one look small," said Pierce. "It just had so much girth to it. When I tried weighing it on my digital scale, the scale malfunctioned. A friend brought a larger scale that showed the fish weighed around 57 pounds. At that point, a night of fishing turned into a dash to get this thing officially weighed. The whole time, I wanted to keep it alive."