“Ronnie told me what to look for,” Paxinos said. Targeting trophy flatheads follows the same pattern, a lesson Powell taught Paxinos. He gave me a lot of good advice.”Įvery deer hunter knows the main requirements to kill a big buck are to hunt where whitetails live and recognize the places they haunt. By then, he’d caught 60 flatheads weighing more than 30 pounds. He met me on the river one day when I was 11.
“I started from scratch, a lot of people helped,” said Paxinos, who gave major credit to Ronnie Powell, whom he referred to as a Goldsboro catfishing legend.
That’s when you usually catch big catfish, and it was something I wanted to do. “I was working after school, and if I wanted to do something fun, I had to do it at night. “I started catching flatheads 13 years ago in high school,” said Paxinos, 29, who lives in Goldsboro. Wildlife Resources Commission in Lenoir County - Bardner spends plenty of time during the summer dreaming about and targeting these magnum-sized catfish.
In places that can be crossed in three or four steps, a huge flathead may be hiding under a log in 6 to 10 feet of water.Īlong with his fishing buddy, Michael Paxinos - an enforcement officer with the N.C. Only the Cape Fear River among eastern North Carolina’s rivers produces specimens that rival the Neuse’s flatheads.īut nowhere else are these fish found in such a narrow stream as this section of the Neuse. The net is for hoisting flathead catfish that may weigh as much as 80 pounds from the Neuse River west of Kinston. The first thing you notice when you board Clinton Bardner’s 18-foot flat-bottom aluminum boat - besides a cinder block tied to a sturdy rope - is a landing net large enough to hold a a 9- or 10-year-old kid. This flathead catfish has a mouth big enough swallow most any other fish in the Neuse River, maybe even angler Michael Paxinos.
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