It took roughly a quarter of an hour to bring it up from 40 feet down, and when it surfaced Joseph Driggers was holding a fish that will headline South Carolina's record book for years. The patrol sergeant from Mars Bluff has the new state-record flathead catfish — a brute certified at 113.7 pounds.
The catch came on June 10 in the lower Pee Dee River in Florence County, where Driggers was probing a deep eddy beside an old railroad trestle. His setup was classic big-cat tackle: a Santee-Cooper rig built around a five-ounce pancake weight, a 50-pound leader, and bait suspended just inches above the riverbed. The bite, when it came, was anything but classic.
"After 15 minutes of fighting him, I finally got him to come in," Driggers said.
That fish rewrote a record that had held firm since 2018, when Paul Daniels of Hanahan landed an 85-pound flathead. Beating an existing catfish record by nearly 30 pounds is remarkable — these marks usually change hands by a few ounces at a time, not by the weight of a second sizeable fish.
Confirming it meant weighing the catfish twice. An initial reading at a Johnsonville skinning shed put it at 113 pounds. South Carolina Department of Natural Resources biologists then re-checked it on certified scales at a Georgetown marina, where the official figure came in at 113.7 pounds.
Flatheads were introduced to these coastal rivers rather than born to them, but the Pee Dee has turned out to be ideal habitat. With bream and other baitfish plentiful, the system's biggest flatheads pack on weight year after year, and Driggers' catch shows the ceiling is higher than most anglers imagined.
For perspective, the IGFA all-tackle world record flathead — a 123-pounder from Kansas — has stood since 1998. Driggers' fish now sits just short of that global benchmark, making it one of the largest flathead catfish ever weighed and, beyond any doubt, the biggest in South Carolina history.
