About Simms
A U.S. Coast Guard captain, Richard Simms holds a wildlife & fisheries management degree, is a former game warden for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and an outdoor journalist and book author with 50 years’ experience as a Tennessee river rat.
Capt. Richard Simms is proud of his largest fish ever, even if his wife periodically reminds him that the largest fish she ever caught is bigger.
“She’s always quick to point that out,” he says with a hearty laugh.
Simms has helped hundreds of people catch their largest fish ever through his guide service, Scenic City Fishing Charters. Everyone from the Tennessee wildlife commissioner to completely new anglers have caught trophy catfish with Simms’ guidance.
He’s seen his clientele haul in bigger fish than he’s ever caught, but Simms has never been envious of his stewards. All he’s looking for are plentiful bites and a good fight.
“I always tell folks that I don’t like to fish, I like to catch fish,” Simms says. “I don’t deal with fighting tediousness well. When you’ve hooked a fish, though, there’s no boredom at all. You just have to control yourself.”
On a warm July night in 2013, in the moonlit shadow of the Tennessee Aquarium on the riverfront, Simms got the good fight he was looking for. He and his fishing partner Ty Konkle had been looking to escape the heat. As the sun dipped below the horizon, bites were coming periodically for the pair, and at that moment, Konkle was battling something that wasn’t in the mood to leave the river.
“All these catfish have personalities,” says Simms. “You can have a 20-pounder that fights like a 60 [pounder]. Every time you get a bite, you just don’t know what you’ve got.”
Konkle had just managed to work his catfish onboard, but Simms was distracted. Right as Konkle’s quarry had been hauled in, one of Simms’ rods had jerked as a fish contemplated the free meal in front of it at the bottom of the river. Simms snatched up the rod to set the hook. “I estimated it at about 20 or 30 pounds, but he fought harder the closer I got him to the boat,” Simms says. “I came to realize, ‘Oh crap, this is a whole lot bigger than I thought.'”
Roughly five minutes into the fight it became abundantly clear to Simms that this was no average fish. The excitement and anticipation was palpable in the humid night air as the distant rush of cars along the parkway provided a low hum in the background.
Simms’ fight with the fish lasted over 30 minutes, at times seeming like a never-ending back-and-forth of reeling to bring it closer before giving a bit of slack so the line wouldn’t break. He’d been part of long battles before; during one of his charters he had once helped a client fight with a blue catfish for an hour and a half. “Catfish are like heavyweight fighters,” he says. “You can’t hook and reel them in fast. They fight hard, but it’s a different kind of fight. They try to wear you down with their size, and you have to stay strong.”
Could this be his biggest fish ever? Simms wasn’t sure. Even for an expert such as him it can be difficult to gauge the size of a fish based solely on its fight.
With the net ready in Konkle’s hand, Simms brought his catfish up to the surface. The fish was none too happy about this development, but once ensnared in the net, there was little it could do about it. The pair swiftly brought the fish onboard for weighing.
With the moon beaming in the sky above, the scale’s measurement was clear: 65 pounds, Simms’ largest to date.
“It’s a really good feeling when you see your partner lower that net under the fish,” says Simms. “At that point, you’re just ready to sit down.”
Simms is proud of that catch, but 65 pounds is nowhere near the largest blue catfish Simms has had his hands on. He recalls one crisp Sunday morning a few years preceding his big catch. He was relaxedly casting his line out, enjoying the cool breeze on Lake Chickamauga, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man on another boat a few hundred yards way frantically waving at him. Perhaps the man or a fishing partner needed medical aid, Simms thought. Or maybe his boat had run into an issue. He quickly made his way over to the older angler.
“I get up to him and he asks me for help,” Simms recounts. “He had hooked a huge catfish that I knew was over 100 pounds and he couldn’t get it in the boat.”
The fish was positively gargantuan. Simms had never seen one so massive. It took considerable effort, but the two managed to work the fish up and onto the older angler’s boat. Simms had friends at the aquarium he knew might be interested in such a monster catfish, but the fisherman he’d assisted was intent on taking his catch home. Simms went home that night curious about the catfish. He was confident it was over 100 pounds. But by how much? The recreational fishing record for blue catfish in Tennessee is 112 pounds. Could it have been a record breaker?
A few weeks later, fortune struck Simms when he ran into the same fisherman on the lake again.
“I asked him if he had a weight and he told me it was 116 pounds,” he says. “So I turn to him and tell him that was a record-breaking fish. I’ll never forget, he looked at me, shrugged and said, ‘Ah hell, I don’t care about that.’ I had my hands on the state record and helped it get in the boat, and that guy couldn’t care less,” Simms laughs.
He smiles as he recalls the memory, but Simms says he’s confident there are more record breakers in the local lakes and reservoirs around Chattanooga.
“We all believe we’ve had 100-pound-plus fish on the line that we didn’t or couldn’t get to the boat,” he says. “I’ve seen it numerous times where people start jerking on their rod thinking they’re hung up on the bottom, when really, they’ve probably hooked a huge fish. People don’t realize it, but one big bite can be the bite of a lifetime.”