Night Fishing on the James River

Tim won our raffle for an eight hour guided fishing trip and he decided to fish at night. We started the evening by soaking the gill net and using some of our white perch from our morning trip to fish while we waited on the net. It took a few sets of the gill net to find some gizzard Shad, but while we waited, we were able to start the evening off with a blue catfish around 8 pounds.

It wasn’t long before the sun was setting, and we transitioned over to fishing some lighted docks. The first one we pulled up on, had some fish, but it wasn’t fully active.

We made a big move and pulled up on a lighted dock with hundreds of catfish surface feeding. For the next 60 to 90 minutes, we were casting and catching blue catfish and some white perch with a catch rate of about one fish every three casts. The action was fast, and we put out one catfish rod with cut bait and quickly hooked up on a bigger catfish.

We tossed that rod back out and within 10 minutes, we had another nice size catfish in the boat.

The action was fast and furious, and we were having a great time. However, the wind picked up to the point where it was not safe to stay there anymore.

We bounced around, looking for places to hide from the wind and that put us back into some protected creeks. In our first spot, we went shallow and missed two fish in the first 20 minutes

We moved out of the shallow area and fished a deep creek bend without any luck. We made one final move, for the last hour of the trip, and it was a very quiet anchor without any fish coming in.

Thanks for joining us on the water. It was fun showing you a new section of the river. Hope to see you back out here again soon.