Photo courtesy of Buddy McKellar.

When Buddy McKeller rose on the morning of June 2, 2007, to wet a line in Pataula Creek, the veteran Fort Gaines fisherman was expecting a business-as-usual excursion. After all, the 60-year-old construction company job superintendent is an avid angler who literally and figuratively lives on the creek, and fishes every chance he gets. Like countless other southwest Georgia anglers, fishing is this man’s chief respite from a typically hard week of work.

That day, armed with his customary baitcasting rig, its reel spooled with 17-pound-test line, McKeller, accompanied by his wife Sandra, powered up his boat, motored up the creek, and was soon casting a Texas-rig worm into likely shallow-water largemouth bass haunts. It was a scenario played out innumerable times through the years. What ensued a short time later, however, went beyond all expectations.

“We’d decided earlier that morning to stay in the creek because the wind was up and we figured it’d be too rough out on the main lake,” McKeller said. “Little did I know what I’d find there, though.”

Pataula Creek is a south-end tributary of 47,000-acre Lake Walter F. George and what he “found” in the warm, sluggish waters of the drought-lowered reservoir arm was a striped bass, that hard-fighting, migratory true-bass species equally at home in both fresh and saltwater.

Normally, such an occurrence wouldn’t raise too many fishermen’s eyebrows. The Gulf-strain striped bass subspecies is regularly stocked in the sprawling U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir; sizeable schools of the fish cruise the lake, and a few ocean-run stripers swim up the Chattahoochee River each spring to join them. Ample annual stockings by the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division make a striped bass’ presence in the lake no big deal.

McKeller’s striper, however, weighed 39 pounds, 8 ounces -- a weight that not so much broke as completely shattered the previous lake record of 17 pounds, 4 ounces. To date, the fish is thought to be the largest recorded catch ever taken from the lake on hook and line, species notwithstanding. (Continued)

“I’d already made quite a few casts,” recalled McKeller, “and was actually just making a long throw down the creek to straighten out my line. You know how you have to do from time to time to get those little kinks out” Well, that’s when the big fish hit -- shortly after that long random cast. It was just one of those right-place-at-the-right-time things. It’s almost like I wasn’t even actually fishing at the moment.”

For a while after the monster striper engulfed his soft-plastic offering, McKeller wasn’t even certain that what he had on the opposite end of his line was a fish. “I saw him take it,” he explained. “The water was shallow, and there was this big V-shaped wake when he was swimming toward the bait. I’ve been fishing since I was 2 years old, and I’ve seen gators chase a lure just like that. Tell you the truth, that’s what I thought it was at first.”

About 15 minutes into the feverish battle between surprised angler and fish, Sandra McKeller got her first brief look at the behemoth and suggested to her husband that it might be a big catfish. From the way the fish was fighting, McKeller guessed hybrid -- the hatchery-bred white bass/striper cross that inhabits the lake in large numbers.

“I really didn’t know what it was to begin with -- big hybrid, catfish, whatever,” McKeller said. “I was too busy to think about much of anything besides just hoping to get near enough to a shallow sandbar so I could get out of the boat and fight the fish more to my advantage. That never happened, though: I had to fight him from the boat all the way.”

Almost a half-hour after the initial strike -- during which time the fish evaded the couple’s too-small landing net and McKeller’s first attempt at a one-handed behind-the-gill-plate boating came up short -- Mrs. McKeller at last managed to pin the striper’s head down with the net long enough for the determined angler to grab it with both hands and hoist it aboard.