
Katherine and Bruce reached out to set up a guide trip for their son, Henry’s, birthday party. After meeting the group at the ramp, we showed the kids how we catch bait. We had the gill net soaking while we picked them up but didn’t expect much bait in the net with the cold snap. They watched us pull the net in and to no surprise there was no bait in the net, which we set in the shallows. We had experienced one of our first very cold nights, with morning temperatures at 36 degrees and we were marking bait deep, with some stragglers in the shallows. Time to toss the cast net. Captain Dan showed the kids how to mark bait fish on the sidescan, downscan, and 2d sonar while Stan tossed the cast net to pull them up. Most of the bait was sitting in 20-30 ft of water, hugging the channel ledges, leading up to the shallows. They looked like they were hunkering down, ready to move into the shallows as the sun came up. A couple tosses of the net resulted in a livewell full of fresh gizzard shad and it was time to head to the first fishing location.

A quick scan of a channel ledge showed fish down in the channel, on the channel, and on the flats. We spotlocked on the channel ledge and spread out 8 rods to cover water depths from 3 to 35 feet deep. After sitting for roughly an hour, we only had a few taps and they came on the shallow rods. We were able to convince one fish to bite and he tipped the scales just under 4 lbs. After we landed him, we sat for about 20 more minutes without much action. It was time to make a move.

We pulled in the rods, switched to our DIY DRAGGING WEIGHTS and started to move slowly towards the shallows. Once we were in motion, we deployed the AlphaBoardz and got a nice wide spread of baits behind the boat. We started marking more and more fish in the shallows but we were only able to get one fish to eat. Fortunately it was a really nice 16 lb blue cat. Since it was Henry’s birthday party, he reeled in the first fish and was met with his new pb at 16 lbs!

We weren’t marking a ton of bait and realized we were in a travel corridor so we changed up tactics a bit and headed for some deeper flats, of about 12-18 ft of water. Based on the way the sun was rising and some bank structure, we found an area that was heating up faster than the rest of the water around it and we slowly started creeping that way. This proved to be the right decision as the graph was covered with bait and catfish as far as the eye could see. Unfortunately, the 16 lb blue cat taught us that most of the fish were buried in the mud, trying to find a stable environment to wait out the cold snap. This proved to be a very tough bite. After an hour of steadily passing over big fish after big fish, we found one that was ready to eat. He hit the bait so hard he took the entire planer board underwater. The boat erupted in excitement as Alice grabbed the rod and began battling the beast. The fish fought hard for about 5 minutes until we got it alongside the boat and were able to net it. Captain Dan pulled the 32 lb trophy blue catfish over the rail and our guests were amazed at the size of the fish. The entire boat was nothing but smiles, especially after so many other fish let us down.

We unhooked the giant, grabbed a weight, took a few photos and released it back into the water where it swam away healthy. It’s always nice seeing a big fish swim off, knowing it’ll continue to thrive in the river. Who knows. Maybe our paths will cross down the road when the fish is even bigger!
We felt like we checked a box of finding a trophy fish and decided to switch up our tactics to look for a more exciting bite. We beached the boat so our guests could explore a little and use the restroom, then it was off to another section of the river. We cut up some fresh shad, eel, and white perch and fan casted 9 rods around the boat into 1-2 ft of water. We didn’t even have all 9 rods out when rods started getting nibbles. The first fish grabbed a bait and came to the boat within 5 minutes but never had the hook, when he saw the boat, he released his grip on the bait and swam off.

We caught a number of eater size fish over the next 20 minutes and realized most of our fish were choosing eel. We switched all the rods over to eel, hoping things would really pick up but the incoming tide had some cooler water rolling into our spot and the bite slowed. We caught a few more small fish as we hung out over the next hour. While we waited for the rods to go down, we cleaned the fish in the livewell and packaged them up for our guests. Before long, it was time to head back to the ramp. We enjoyed our 20 minute cruise along the river and dropped our guests off at the ramp. What started off as a very chilly and slow morning turned into a solid trip with lots of great memories and gorgeous weather.
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