Huge record flathead catfish was complete surprise for Michigan bowfisherman

Lake Orion, Mich. — Codie Carlson thought he was aiming at dinner. Instead the relatively new bow fisher went home with a new Michigan state record.

Carlson, 34, of Newport, was headed home from his job in airfield maintenance at Metro Airport on June 29 when he stopped at Plum Creek in Monroe County for a little late-night bowfishing. He certainly  wasn’t thinking about bringing home a new state record flathead catfish.

“About five minutes after I got there, about 11:50 or 12-o-clock at night, I saw it and thought ‘(Heck) yeah, dinner’. I didn’t know we even had flatheads in Plum Creek,” Carlson told Michigan Outdoor News.

 “It was just as much a surprise to me as it was to anyone. I saw the mouth and the whiskers and thought it was a channel cat.”

Carlson’s shot was true. He hit the behemoth flathead just behind the side fin.

“It was like a grenade went off,” he said. Carlson said he didn’t have his headlamp on, only the light on his bow, and while the fish was taking out line, he set down the bow and grabbed the line in his hand.

“When I shot it I saw about 6 or 8 inches of the arrow sticking out. He played out all the rope and started dragging my bow across the ground so I put some pressure on the rope to slow him down. When I started to pull him in he stopped me twice and wasn’t budging,” Carlson said. “Finally he was on the surface, belly up. When he was about 5 feet away I saw that the arrow had pulled out and he was hanging on by the skin.”

Still in his work clothes, Carlson knew what he had to do.

“I said, ‘Oh Man. Here we go’ and I jumped in the water and grabbed him by the bottom jaw,” he said. “I still didn’t realize it was a flathead until I got him on shore and put my spotlight on it. Then I lost it!”

The huge flathead weighed 64.46 pounds and measured 45 inches long. That beats the previous state-record flathead catfish – a 53.35-pound, 43-incher caught in 2022 by Lloyd Tanner, of Hobart, Indiana, on the St. Joseph River in Berrien County – by 11.11 pounds.

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DNR Fisheries Biologist John Buszkiewicz, who works out of the Michigan DNR’s Lake Erie Fisheries Management Unit, verified Carlson’s new state-record fish. Buszkiewicz and his crew may have caught this exact fish during a survey in the same location in 2020.

At the time, the fish caught weighed 55 pounds and measured 43 inches. 

Michigan’s state-record fish are recognized by weight only. To qualify, fish must exceed the current listed state-record weight and be weighed on a certified commercial scale. Fish identification must be verified by a DNR fisheries biologist. It took most of the day before Carlson found a certified scale.

”I must have called 50 different places,” he said, but finally got in touch with Standard Scale and Supply Company in Redford.

“From the beginning I wanted to do everything right. I followed every step that was told to me.”

This is just Carlson’s second year of bowfishing. He said he’s been fishing since he was about age 3 and hunting since he was 10.

“My grandpa was kind of my dad. He showed me everything,” Carlson said. “My goal this year was to do a catch-and-cook with a flathead. I usually do a catch-and-cook in the back of my truck, but not with this one.”

Carlson admitted that bowfishing is still relatively new to him.

 “I didn’t hit a fish for like the first eight months I tried it,” he said. “I finally started hitting them. Got a lot of carp and gold fish and got my first channel cat this year.”

He also got his first flathead cat this year, and it just happened to be a new Michigan state record.