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When Kev’van Young shouts, “Fish on,” it’s all hands on deck and then some.
The self-proclaimed “Catfish King of the Occoquan” is now in his fourth season producing fishing videos for his YouTube channel of the same name.
A native of Paris, Tenn., Young averages 35 to 50 episodes per fishing season, which lasts from late March to November, wrapping up a few days before Thanksgiving. The channel’s episode total is currently in the 150s, with a little over 1,000 subscribers.
On an overcast August morning, InsideNoVa joined Young and his crew on their weekly fishing trip aboard the “Queen Ida,” a boat named after Young’s mother.
Years ago, the crew started in a 14-foot jon boat before transitioning to their current vessel, an 18-foot boat classified as a 16-foot bass buggy, Young said.
Every Saturday around 7:30 a.m., the crew lifts the anchor from Occoquan Regional Park and sets forth on a new expedition, with the fruits of its labor often devoted to a worthy cause: helping to feed the congregation at Harvest Life Church in Woodbridge during fish fry events.
Helping hands
Each fitted with their own custom shirts and nicknames, the four main crewmembers are Young, the “Catfish King,” 60; Jimmy “The Voice” Benjamin, 55; elder statesman John “J.C. Raider” Crocker, 64, who has been fishing with Young for around 20 years, and the youngest of the bunch, Atonial D. “A.J.” Hyatt Jr., 42, whose principal nickname is “D.G.F.” for “Damn Good Fisherman” – though Hyatt insists he has too many “aka’s” to count.
The four friends are all veterans, three of whom were in the Army – with Hyatt being the only Navy veteran. Everyone refers to Young as simply “Catfish,” his signature moniker.
Young and Benjamin both live in Woodbridge., with Benjamin having grown up in Baltimore. Hyatt lives in Waldorf, Md., and Crocker is a Stafford resident.
Equipped with a “Video Editing for Dummies” book gifted from his wife that is so thick he is rarely inclined to read it, Young has nonetheless become an editing aficionado and routinely uses his GoPro camera while on the water.
“What inspired me to start the channel is basically I had cameras, and I was like, I’m gonna just go out there and make some videos,” Young told InsideNoVa. “After a while, everybody’s like, ‘Well, you need to make a channel.’ At that point, I did not know anything about putting anything on YouTube … but after a while, I started getting a bunch of content together. I said, ‘OK, let me learn how to edit my own video.’ And then that’s when I said, ‘OK, come up with the channel name’ … and start putting it out there.”
Season One, Episode 13 – Benjamin’s first trip on the water accompanying Young – has been the channel’s most-watched episode thus far at 13,000 views.
As for musical accompaniment, Young’s son-in-law lives in Atlanta and helped produce beats for the YouTube channel’s theme song, which opens every video. A key lyric proclaims, “Early in the morning by the break of dawn | Headed to the river, gonna have some fun.”
This is precisely where the friends find themselves shortly past dawn earlier this month, with the sun still not quite peeking out from behind the clouds.
The day’s route takes the boat underneath the Interstate 95 and Route 1 bridges all the way to Belmont Bay in Woodbridge – as well as a stone’s throw from the state Route 123 bridge in the trip’s early going.
‘Barber shop on the water’
Asked about his favorite part of each weekend’s excursion, Hyatt had fishing analogies aplenty.
“I feel like you get to turn everything off,” Hyatt said. “For a couple hours, maybe four or five hours, you get to turn off anything that you was going through all week, waking up in the morning, anything like that. This is your time, your time to yourself – time to have fun with the fellas. It’s like the barber shop on the water.
“It’s just like family time, you know what I’m saying. It’s almost like we have Thanksgiving every Saturday.”
The crew follows safety protocol at every turn, notably by saying “Casting” – to announce that one is casting his line – and also declaring “Fish on!” whenever a fish catches on the bait and it’s time to reel it in.
What’s the go-to bait? Young and his crewmates said they prefer near-expired meat and chicken breast, which tend to be the cheapest at the grocery store. Young then marinates the chicken in Kool Aid and garlic for optimal fish attraction.
Reeling them in
Young typically catches various types of catfish: “channel cats,” “flatheads,” blue cats” and “swamp cats” – with the “blue cats” generally kept for cooking.
On the August morning, Young and his mates catch a flathead, several blue cats and a channel cat – with the day’s higher-end weights generally around 8 to 12 pounds.
According to Young, the boat record is 37 catfish in one day, which the crew stored in a large cooler and bucket.
To date, Young’s personal best is a 44.8-pound fish caught on the James River. On the Occoquan, the record is 27 pounds.
“The Occoquan record, the person that’s caught the biggest catfish – her name is Miss Beverly,” Young said. “She’s a member of our church. She hadn’t fished in over 30 years, and she said she wanted to come fishing, so I brought her out, and she caught the very first fish.”
Young continued, “It ran us around the boat, underneath the boat.”
