Edward’s First Trophy Blue Catfish

Skip and Edward joined us on the James River for an afternoon trip. They wanted to catch some fish and a trophy would be an added bonus. This trip followed our morning trip from the previous blog post so we went right back to the hot bite we were on earlier.

Unfortunately, the tide had flipped while we were picking the guys up so the pattern had changed. That’s one major challenge of fishing a tidal river. Stan and I theorized where the fish went and we took off to use our sonar to test our theory. We were not right with our first idea as we weren’t seeing much on the graph. Credit to Skip and Edward, they trusted the process and let us work on thinking through the new pattern. We made a big run in the opposite direction and started marking fish.

We tossed out the rods and gave the fish time to come to our bait. About a half hour into our anchor, a rod finally went down. Edward grabbed the rod and the battle was on. The blue catfish used the tide to ours advantage and put up a major fight. We were surprised it wasn’t a much bigger fish when we got it to the boat but it was still a very respectable, fired up, blue catfish weighing in at 23.26 lbs on our certified scale. Congrats on an awesome catch!

We moved spots and the fish we were making were not super active but we gave them some time. Eventually, a rod went down and Edward caught a spawned out fish weighing about 14 lbs.

With time running short, we scanned some bridge piling and found fish stacked up so the base. We swapped in fresh bait and tied the rods out. There was much faster action at this spot and within the first 15 minutes, we connected with a fish that folded the rod over violently. Edward handled the fish like a pro and took his time pulling the fish to the surface so it could decompress. After a couple, hard fought, mines we scooped the fish up and Edward laid eyes on his first trophy blue catfish! It was a tiny bit shy of trophy weight but ended up measuring over 38 inches which also qualifies!

Welcome to the trophy club! We appreciate your patience as we dialed in the pattern. We hope you had a great time on the water and can’t wait for the next trip!