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.