Texas is big. So are our fish. In this occasional series we talk to Texas anglers about their monster catches.
Name: Austin Anderson
Age: 28
Hometown: Coppell
Years fishing: 26+
Favorite fishing holes: Lady Bird Lake and Lake Michigan
Austin Anderson, a 28-year-old professional carp and buffalo fishing guide, was fishing by himself on June 10 from the bank of Lady Bird Lake when he hooked into a life-changing fish. Two days before, the Austin-based angler had been fishing with a buddy in the same spot when he saw a huge fish jump, or crash, far from shore, almost in the middle of the downtown Austin lake. “Immediately something in my mind clicked. I don’t know what it was, but I was just like, ‘That’s her. That’s the fish I want to catch,’ ” he said.
On the day of his catch, Anderson employed an unusual tactic: he piloted his bait—a type of root vegetable nicknamed tiger nuts—far out into the lake using a remote-controlled boat, farther than the little vessel had ever gone before. It was risky; he worried that the boat might not make it back but he wanted to put the tiger nuts right where he had seen the jumping quarry. Fifteen minutes later, he got the hookup.
After a half-hour exhilarating fight, Anderson reeled in a 71-pound, 10-ounce smallmouth buffalo—a water body record and also a statewide catch-and-release record for the species. Three species of buffalo—the smallmouth, bigmouth, and black buffalo—are native to Texas. Recent scientific research has shown that buffalo are among the longest-living vertebrates on earth, with some individuals living as long as 127 years. Historically, many Texas anglers have scorned the broad-shouldered, carp-like buffalo as a “rough” fish—an undesirable member of the same backwater club as the carp and the gar. But thanks to anglers like Anderson, attitudes are changing. Most of the world records for smallmouth buffalo were set in Texas. Anderson spoke with Texas Monthly about his prodigious catch.
Forrest Wilder: You’re a professional fishing guide who specializes in carp and buffalo, which is pretty unusual. How did that come about?
Austin Anderson: In high school, I was into all these different types of fishing. I kind of stumbled upon the carp and the buffalo just because I was fishing these lakes and I saw these big fish that really no one was targeting. I started researching online and I found this website called Texas Fishing Forum, which had a carp fishing section. I didn’t know that there were even people that fish for carp or buffalo. And I figure out there’s people from England and they come over here and they have all the fancy equipment. And they have tournaments every month and I was like, “Whoa, this is a whole new world.” So I started going to some of their events and learning a little bit.
I eventually got a few sponsors and I started writing for a carp fishing magazine my sophomore year of high school. Then I got into fishing some carp tournaments. At one of the tournaments, I caught a 50.6 pound buffalo. That was my best catch that I’d ever had, the biggest of any species. And about two days after the tournament, I got a call from the tournament director and he said, “You need to call IGFA [the International Game Fish Association] because that’s the junior world record.” I’m fifteen years old. I didn’t even know that there were world records for fishing at that point. I submit the catch and it gets approved and then it goes all over the news. That fish gave me a lot of attention. And so I started guiding basically right when I graduated high school and went to college at Stephen F. Austin.
FW: Walk me through the experience of catching the 71-pounder. What was it like?
AA: When these fish bite, they immediately start ripping line. It’s like you’re hooked up to a piece of construction equipment driving the other direction. It may only be moving three miles an hour, but it’s an unstoppable force. It’s just pulling and pulling and pulling. And at this point, I’m a little bit worried that I don’t have enough line on my reel.
The fight lasted probably over thirty minutes, just back and forth, back and forth. And then it finally rolled on the surface and I saw it and I just started freaking out, screaming. And I’m sure people all around the jogging trail could hear me because I was just yelling. And it went in my net the first go. I was just in disbelief.
FW: Has catching the fish changed your life in any way?
AA: Dude, absolutely. It’s been really crazy. Just the amount of attention that catch has gotten. I had people come up to me in the grocery store and say, “Hey, are you the kid that caught that giant fish?” Yeah, that’s me. It’s been really weird.
It made it to Fox News and we got on all the local TV stations. I had people in Dallas and College Station and in the Longview area calling me saying they saw me on the news. And I had a flood of bookings come in. I’m booking trips over a year in advance right now. And a lot of these upcoming trips are clients from overseas. We’re getting a lot of people from England; I have a guy from the Netherlands coming in, France.
FW: I think it’s got to have something to do obviously with the size of the fish. And a lot of people aren’t familiar with smallmouth buffalo. They look kind of funky. And then I think the fact that i’’s in Lady Bird Lake, right in downtown Austin.
AA: In the middle of downtown, you’ve got paddleboarders and people swimming—none of them know there’s a fish bigger than their dog in that lake, swimming right below them. So it has that kind of wow factor. But none of us, even us guys that fish Lady Bird every day, none of us knew that fish had gotten that big. We knew it was in there. It’s been caught by six or seven different people. About two and a half years ago, it made the news for getting caught at 64 pounds by one of my friends, Cassidy. And so I caught the fish two years and I think four months after him and it had gained almost eight pounds, which is just unheard of for a fish that size to gain that much weight.
FW: Because you guys keep feeding it!
AA: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly. We’re making them strong and happy, that’s for sure.
But I don’t think that’s the biggest one. That was probably the biggest [buffalo] in Lady Bird. But I think there’s bigger ones out there. I think someone’s going to catch an eighty-pounder in Texas within the next couple of years. I want as many people to learn about them as possible because I think they’re the coolest fish. I have dedicated basically my whole career toward catching them because I just think they’re so neat.
FW: In England, where carp fishing is huge, a lot of famous carp have names, like Heather the Leather and Causeway Fish.
AA: Yeah, we’re getting to the point over here where I’m starting to think, man, we need to name these buffalo.
FW: Okay. Last question: What advice would you give to the novice angler? Particularly maybe someone who wants to get into carp or buffalo?
AA: If you haven’t caught a carp or a buffalo, go try because you’re going to be surprised at how hard they fight.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
