Oliver Schäfer knew early that something heavy had taken his lure. How heavy only became clear after a tug-of-war of more than half an hour, when a broad whiskered head finally broke the surface of the Rybnik reservoir in southern Poland. With his Dutch partner Kevin Cremers steering the boat into the wind, Schäfer, 34, who lives in North Rhine-Westphalia, brought the fish to shore, where tournament judges laid a tape along it: 292 centimetres.
About 150 anglers in 70 teams from across Europe had gathered for the predator-fishing contest over the weekend of October 10-11. The monster still did not win it for them, since standings were calculated on combined scores, and the pair ended up second. Rules required the catfish to go straight back into the water after measuring. It was carried on a tarpaulin to protect the slimy coating that shields its skin.
There is a twist. Regulars at the lake are convinced it is the very same fish that two local men, Krzysztof Pyra and Adrian Gontarz, pulled out at the same event a year earlier, which also measured exactly 2.92 metres. In twelve months it has gained girth but not a single centimetre of length. The organisers joked that one more centimetre next year would rewrite the record books.
Officially, nobody keeps a tally of the longest catfish; record keepers for sport fishing go by the scales instead. For comparison, a 2.85-metre specimen came out of Italy’s River Po in 2023. Rybnik owes its giants to a coal-fired power station whose warm cooling water flows into the reservoir, ideal for the wels catfish, the biggest freshwater species native to Europe and Germany’s fish of the year for 2026. Schäfer says a three-metre catch is now only “a hand’s breadth” away.
