Joseph Driggers needed about 15 minutes to wrestle a fish the size of a grown child up from 40 feet of water. When it finally rolled to the surface of the Pee Dee River, the patrol sergeant from Mars Bluff had a new South Carolina state record on his hands — a flathead catfish that state biologists later certified at 113.7 pounds.
Driggers hooked the fish on June 10 in the lower Pee Dee, in Florence County, working a deep back eddy near an old railroad trestle. He was fishing a Santee-Cooper rig — a slide swivel and plastic tube riding above a five-ounce pancake weight — on a 50-pound leader, with his bait held five or six inches off the bottom.
Then the rod loaded up.
"After 15 minutes of fighting him, I finally got him to come in," Driggers said.
The catch toppled a record that had stood since 2018, when Paul Daniels of Hanahan weighed a flathead of roughly 85 pounds. Driggers' fish beat that mark by close to 30 pounds — a margin that is almost unheard of in a category where records usually fall by ounces.
Getting it certified took two trips to the scales. The fish first registered 113 pounds at a skinning shed in Johnsonville. To make it official, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologists re-weighed it on certified scales at a marina in Georgetown, where it settled at 113.7 pounds and was confirmed as the new state record.
Flathead catfish are not native to South Carolina's coastal rivers. The introduced predators were never meant to be here, but they have thrived in the Pee Dee system, where an endless supply of bream and other forage fish lets a handful of individuals grow to extraordinary sizes. Driggers' fish is proof of just how big they can get.
It also puts him within sight of the all-time greats. The International Game Fish Association's all-tackle world record for a flathead is a 123-pound fish caught in Kansas in 1998 — a benchmark that has gone unchallenged for more than a quarter of a century. At 113.7 pounds, the Pee Dee giant is now one of the largest flatheads ever recorded anywhere in the world, and the biggest South Carolina has ever produced.
For Driggers, the reward was a fish he could barely lift and a number that will headline the state record book for the foreseeable future.