Kayla Templet caught a 25-pound blue catfish from the same bank at Chester Frost Park that her husband Joseph caught a 29-pound-4-ounce flathead catfish.Two years into their marriage, after two years of dating each other, Rossville residents Kayla and Joseph Templet clearly are hooked.
Hooked on setting hooks, as well. They've got the His and Hers catfish to prove it -- a flathead and a blue cat totaling almost 55 pounds three days apart in the same place.
The two are among 10 members of Kayla's family planning to participate in a Southern Catfishing tournament March 7 at the Big Whiskers catfish farm in Columbia, Tenn.
Kayla is a 5-foot-2, 109-pound 21-year-old who works at the Things Remembered store in Hamilton Place mall. She calls herself "quite an intense person," but she's been fishing all her life, beginning in Hixson and continuing in Florida and northern New York and other home areas along the way.
She's fully immersed in the outdoors life. She makes and sells jewelry out of lures and fishing line; she blogs for hillbillybonez.org, providing recipes and fishing poems and sometimes even revealing her fishing secrets, she admits. And she fishes for various species, including trout in the Elk River and at Tellico Plains and this time of year even in nearby Lake Junior.
Not long after she met Joseph in Kansas, where he grew up around cities -- Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, for example -- and often did construction work for military bases, she asked him to take her fishing.
"He said, 'I've never fished before,'" she related. "I said, 'What?!'"
"She kind of laughed at me then," Joseph said. "But then we moved down here and she started fishing with her cousins. She told them I had never fished and they got me to go out and try it -- 'at least once or twice,' they said. They took me out catfishing and I got hooked on it."
Let Kayla tell the story about the two big cats they caught two months ago.
"On December 4 I caught a skipjack herring on a Bobby Garland crappie jig and used it for catfish bait," she said. "That evening around 6, I caught a 25-pound blue catfish off the bank at Chickamauga Lake (on the channel side of the island at Chester Frost Park). That was my personal best.
"My city boy husband, who hadn't fished till he met me, got a one-day fishing license three days later and was lucky enough that around 5 p.m. -- in the same honey hole -- he caught a 29-pound-4-ounce flathead on a bluegill, busting my personal best!"
She seemed both proud and a little annoyed at Joseph's big catch but quickly took comfort in the fact that he was reeled into her world.
Joseph Templet holds the 29-pound-4-ounce flathead catfish he caught three days after his wife, Kayla, caught this 25-pound blue cat from the same bank at Chester Frost Park.Joseph, 34, played football and wrestled in his teen years "and then got into amateur fighting," he said. Any thoughts he had about fishing in his younger years, he admitted, "my outlook was what was the point of going out there, throwing a line out and just sitting there waiting for something to happen? I had other things to do.
"But going out there with people who knew what to do, where to go, how to do it, all of a sudden it was interesting," he added.
The key instructor, besides Kayla, has been Steve Thomas, her cousin.
"My mom taught me to fish when I was 2 for small bluegill and bullhead catfish," Kayla said, "but all my angling knowledge on bass, crappie, trout and BIG catfish like flatheads and blues I learned from Steve. He's been in the paper before for his large fish, and I wouldn't have caught anything I have without him. He is truly my best friend and teacher, and I cannot thank him enough for believing in me as a female angler when no one else did.
"I'm a small person," she added, "but I get an extreme adrenaline rush pulling in a big fish."
No longer concerned about boredom when fishing, Joseph has developed appreciation for its calming effect.
"It's relaxing. It takes you out of modern society," he said, "like stepping back in time. Me and my wife, when we go, just sit on the bank and watch the birds, ducks and geese fly by. We don't listen to music or sports. If it's at night, we build a fire, but otherwise we just enjoy being there and being still."
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.