Sherwood man snags the catfish of his life
By Greg Rayburn \ Editor \ grayburn@sherwoodvoice.com
Thursday, July 10, 2008 2:59 PM CDT
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| Keith Byrd holds the 40-pound catfish he caught while fishing with his children at Indianhead Lake recently. It’s a fish story he’s ready to tell the rest of his life. (Photo courtesy of Butch Davis) |
It may not be the size of Moby Dick or have teeth as sharp as Jaws, but Sherwood’s Keith Byrd recently caught the fish of his life.
At about 6 p.m. June 27, he and his children, Avery, 7, and Parker, 4, were fishing at Indianhead Lake on the family boat.
“We just wanted to have a good evening together,” Byrd said.
Byrd cast his line and waited.
Then the line started to tug. And tug some more. Finally, something big appeared to be thrashing in the water, caught in the line.
“With all the water splashing, how big it was, we knew we had something big,” Byrd said.
Finally, as Byrd got closer to the catch, he saw what he calls a monster … a whopper … a beast of the open lake. He had bagged a 40-pound catfish.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Byrd said. “My dad started taking me fishing when I was little. I’ve been fishing for about 30 years. Something like this has never happened to me.”
The fish was so big that he couldn’t pull it in by the line alone. He grabbed it by the gills and flipped it into the boat.
“My kids were speechless,” Byrd said.
He had taken a small ice chest on the voyage, but it was barely big enough.
“I had to stuff it in the best I could until I got home,” Byrd said.
Once home, he and the kids were greeted by his wife, Libby, who got a warning about the big fish from a cell phone call from Byrd on the way home.
“I told her it was big, but she really never knew how big it was until she saw it,” Byrd said.
Once home, word of the mammoth catfish spread quickly in his Mohave Street neighborhood.
Visitors started swarming by his house to hear about the big fish that didn’t get away.
“People’s eyes were big when they saw it,” Byrd said.
Unlike in some movies, such as the 1981 classic On Golden Pond starring Henry Fonda, this fish didn’t get away.
It became the main course at the Byrd household.
For days, Byrd looked for ways to eat 40 pounds of catfish. He had leftovers for weeks.
More important than the cuisine that resulted from the catfish was the pictorial evidence. Byrd said he wanted to make sure he got photographs so everyone would believe his story.
“I’ll remember this for the rest of my life.”
