Lake Hartwell Sweet Spot Produces 75-Pounder And Blue Catfish Chaos

Aaron Riggins hefts a Lake Hartwell blue catfish that weighed 75 pounds on his uncertified scales. The giant cat and six others caught during the evening of Feb. 17 were all released.

As most people were driving home from their 9-to-5 jobs the evening of Feb. 17, Aaron Riggins was having the fight of his life on Lake Hartwell. “With whom?” you might ask. None other than a 75-lb. catfish, and it very well could have been the same 74-lb. fish he caught in the area about two years prior. With the rainy, cool weather we’ve had recently, many of us were enjoying the warmth of our homes that evening, but not Aaron. He set out for the Seneca River region of Hartwell, aiming to take advantage of the some stained water conditions—knowing the abundant rain we’ve had recently would push the big catfish up shallow and get them active and biting.

When Aaron weighed his big catch using a 110-lb. scale he keeps in his boat, it weighed in at 75 pounds. Aaron quickly released the giant catfish instead of getting it weighed on certified scales, or it would have shattered the current official Lake Hartwell blue catfish record, a 30-lb., 8-oz. fish caught by on June 26, 2003.

Aaron is a Lake Hartwell native; living in Anderson, S.C., and he fishes this lake regularly. Due to the frigid cold of this past winter, he only braved the weather a few times, but says he typically “fishes weekly all year round, if not daily.”

He was specifically targeting trophy catfish during his Monday evening trip to the Savannah River reservoir.

“About two years ago on March 31 of 2023, I caught a 74-lb. catfish out of Hartwell and set my first unofficial record on Hartwell. I weighed it, took a picture, and threw it back.”

About 300 yards away, two years later, Aaron caught the 75-lb. blue catfish you see here.

That particular spot wasn’t fished by Aaron often, but he frequently found success in the general area by “pulling boards and dragging baits.” He used the trolling motor to ease his boat along at about 0.5 mph with six rods out—two lines on two planer boards on each side of the boat and two rods off the back of the boat. It was about 40 minutes before he got his first bite and brought a smaller blue catfish on board. Thirty minutes later, he pulled two more 30-lb. blue catfish onto the boat.

Once Aaron realized that he had found the fish, he pulled everything up, turned around, and went back to pull boards and drag baits in the same spot again. He got another bite about two hours later, at around 5:30 p.m., and then his buddy called. Right as Aaron got on the phone, a rod went down.

In this specific instance, the hit came on a line baited with cut-bait from a 5-lb. carp cut into 2-inch cubes. Aaron was using 10/0 circle hooks attached to 50-lb. main lines and a 60-lb. leader on Mad Katz Outdoors catfishing rods. Aaron said the sweet spot was a flat that turned into a shelf in about 30 feet of water.

“I started fishing right along the ledge of this flat, pulling into the channel. I didn’t even really make it into the channel because all the fish were stacked up on the ledge,” he said.

Aaron started fighting the catfish—they started to tussle as the fish went under the boat and started “diving and digging” deeper and deeper into the 30 feet of water below the boat. That catfish was determined to put the tight drag of Aaron’s reel to the test.

“That fish almost bulldogged me! It about pulled me over the side,” Aaron said. It took him about 10 minutes to pull the giant catfish into the boat.

“It was a challenge to pull it into the boat myself, the catfish was about the same size as my net,” he said.

As he was still on the phone with his friend, another 30- to 40-lb. catfish took a bait just as Aaron got the 75-lb. catfish into the boat. He started fighting that second blue catfish as a THIRD 30- to 40-lb. catfish started hitting another one of his lines. He was able to get the second and third fish into the boat. After releasing all the catfish, another half an hour or so went by when another catfish hooked up—totaling seven big Lake Hartwell blue catfish caught and released by Aaron Riggins that evening.

It got chaotic in Aaron Riggins’ boat as three giant Lake Hartwell catfish—including one that weighed 75 pounds on his uncertified scales—all bit and were hooked up in a matter of minutes during a trip on Monday evening, Feb. 17. All of the fish were released.

The Lake Hartwell Page