New Blue Catfish Personal Best

Hunter joined us on the James River, coming all the way from Texas. His goal was to set a new personal best for blue catfish. We started the evening by catching some live bait and then moved over to drifting channel ledges.

Within the first 30 minutes of drifting, we had a major takedown that bent the rod tip into the water. Hunter grab the rod and battled the fish, which was 40 feet below the boat. The fish pulled drag a few times and finally blew bubbles and came to the surface. We weren’t very far into the trip and Hunter already had a new personal best blue catfish at 27 pounds. Congratulations on an awesome catch.

We continued our drift and marked a ton of big fish and even had a couple good takedowns. The fish were a little finicky, and none of them hooked up, which was tough because some of the takedowns were huge.

We gave the spot a rest and moved to a different stretch of the river. After thoroughly fishing this spot for about 40 minutes, we didn’t find any fish and move on.

We were going to give the fish we missed earlier, a second opportunity to eat some free dinner, but somebody else had snuck into our spot. No big deal we continued onto a different Location.

We didn’t have to drift long in our new spot when we hooked up with another good fish down in some deep water. The fish bent the rod in half and pulled a little bit of drag but Hunter handled it like a champ. Another great fish came to the surface, weighing in at 23 pounds.

We continue to drift in this spot, marked a couple fish, but never hooked up on anything. It was finally time to go back for the fish we missed in the first spot. Unfortunately, it was more of the same story marking great fish, seeing the rods fold in half, but the fish never hooked up. Many times, they were short striking our bait and ripping our live baits clean off the hook.

It was starting to get dark, so we caught a little bit more live bait and set the gill net for some gizzard shad. We started dragging in a shallow pit, and the bike was on fire. In our first 30 minutes, we caught about five fish, all of which were in the 2 to 10 pound range.

We continue to drag and by the end of our trip we had caught about 10 total fish.

Thanks for joining us on the water. We hope to see you out here again someday.