Trophy Blue Catfish are Hungry!

Jordan brought his boys Aiden and Able out for a fishing trip on the James River. Able had never caught a fish before and Aiden was looking to upgrade his personal best. We had some gizzard shad and panfish for bait and started cruising the river looking for a spot to fish. We headed up river but didn’t really mark any fish so we turned around and came back down. On our first spot, we set up on anchor and cast out seven rods. Rods were getting hit right away, but the fish were being a little finicky. We downsized baits a little bit and fish started to come in the boat. The first fish was a small blue catfish.

While sitting on this anchor, we had a double

We kept putting on fresh bait and tossing the rods out, and the fish kept on coming in the boat.

The action was steady, we even had a triple up at one point.

The boys were interested in finding some bigger fish so we started to drag baits down the river ledges. Right away the quality of fish bumped up from about 2 pounds to closer to 8 pounds.

As we continued to drag, we started to catch nicer fish, including this really dark blue catfish.

By this point, the tide was high and about to turn around so we ran up river and started to drift down river. We were marking a lot of fish deep, but the bite was not happening. We continued on our path continue to adjust our baits down to the depth we were fishing.

A couple hours goes by quick and with 15 minutes left none of us were paying attention and a rod folded over and started screaming drag. Abel was on the rod and fought the fishing like a champ. The fish was coming up out of the depth so we took our time bringing it up to the surface and watched a decompress blowing air bubbles on the way up. Next thing we knew we were netting a trophy blue catfish weigh in at 40 pounds. Awesome work guys.

We continued to drag for a couple more minutes without catching any more fish, but we had an awesome day on the river nonetheless. Big fish of the day went 40 pounds and we caught about 16 other blue catfish along the way.

Thanks for joining us on The mighty James River and we hope to see you out here again sometime real soon.