AUSTIN — A man from Terlingua has been making the rounds on Central Texas news outlets after breaking a fishing record on Lady Bird Lake. The lucky catch — a whopping 64-pound buffalo — happened back in February, after a long day of sitting and waiting.
Cassady Douglas and his friend had been fishing from the shore on a small island in the lake for over nine hours, and the sun was starting to set. “We’d been out there since the crack of dawn, pretty much camped out,” he recalled.
There was so little action the two took a nap at one point. All of a sudden, Douglas started to feel a tug on his line. “It was a real subtle bite, which is crazy for such a big fish. It felt like I had a tiny little catfish on there,” he remembered. “Suddenly it was like, ‘Game on.’ If I don’t do something now, this fish is going to get snagged.”
Douglas quickly got in his john boat and followed his catch out into open water. “It was a fight getting that thing up because it was stuck in the depths, I’d say under twenty feet of water,” he said. After a wrestling match of about a half an hour, he was able to get the fish out of the water and onto the scale.
The fish weighed in at 64 pounds — the largest catch ever recorded on the lake. “Buffalo fish are interesting because they’re the largest North American sucker fish, and they get mistaken for carp a lot,” Douglas explained. “There’s just not a whole lot that’s known about them. They’re bottom feeders, and they have a lot of longevity.”
Buffalo fish can live to be over 110 years old. “It’s like the ultimate connection with nature when you catch something like that, because it’s an ancient fish. That one was probably eighty years old,” he speculated. “It was pristine — a very, very healthy fish. Not even a scrape on it.”
Douglas’s angling career began young, setting jug lines on the Rio Grande for catfish. As he got older, he became interested in bass fishing. “For a long time I was kind of biased, like I just wanted to catch a huge bass,” he recalled.
A move to Austin pushed him to expand his angling horizons. “Town Lake is recognized as one of the number one fisheries for carp in the US. A lot of people go there from Europe to fish for carp,” he explained. “I wanted to dive into it and try to get the hang of it. It’s such an interesting way to fish because they’re big game, they put up a crazy fight.”
Douglas maintains an active social media presence around his fishing career and takes learning new techniques very seriously. “Bass takes a super active approach to fishing, and carp are very elusive and very smart,” he said. “It’s a longer fishing session. I treat it like an eight-hour work shift.”
Douglas emphasized that while he loves eating and cooking fish, most of his sessions end in a catch-and-release, including with his record-busting buffalo.
“He’s still out there,” he said. “He’ll live to see another day. Safe handling of fish is very important to me.”
He’s moving to Durango, Colorado at the end of the month, and is hoping that his angling achievements and know-how will grow into a full-time business. “I would like to eventually have a guide service and make it a lucrative thing. I really enjoy doing it and want other people to have fun doing it with me,” he said.
“There’s something really fascinating about fish for me because I grew up in the desert,” he continued. “Going to all these lakes, there’s this whole underwater world that you can see. It’s just so intriguing because you never know what you’re gonna catch.”
