We Caught Over 100 Fish!

Dan Szajta
Jul 21
2 min read

Lee and Jake joined us on the James River for an all night fishing frenzy! We started our trip by fishing for bait. Jake started the trip off with a bang by catching a 5lb largemeouth bass!

We continued to fish and were catching striped bass one after another, often times doubling and tripling up.

The striper bite died down and the white perch bite fired up. We were catching a bunch of jumbo white perch, some in the 10-11in range.

We were having fun catching fish about every other cast and stuck around until we reached 100 fish, which only took about 2 to 2.5 hours.

After completing our mission, we switched gears to catfishing, looking for a trophy fish for Jake. We started by fishing in a creek with some rods cast deep and some in as shallow as one foot of water. We were getting a bunch of short strikes but nothing was hooking up. Most of the action was on the shallower rods so we packed up and moved to a shallwo mud flat. Same thing happened here, many short strikes, no fishing hooking up.

We had about 3 hours left in the trip so we anchored up in a high traffic area and waited for fish to move in. It didnt' take very long before a rod folded over and Jake caught a nice blue catfish, which was a little shy of trophy requirements. It weighted in at 27 lbs and was just over 37 inches long. To be considered a troiphy blue catfish, it needed to be at least 38 inches or 30 lbs. We set the rods back up and continued to wait.

The fish were moving through in waves. The action would quiet down, then a few fish would move through and slam the rods. We picked through some smaller fish and continued to wait out the big one.

As we started to get closer to sunrise, the action started to heat up. We looked at the rods and one folded over and the fish started pulling drag. Jake jumped on the rod and had to fight the fish and the current. A couple minutes of battling the fish and we were able to net it and pull Jake's first trophy blue catfish into the boat. This fish was about 1 lb short of the weight requirement but measured in at 40 inches, well over trophy length. The fish had recently come off the spawning beds and was very skinny for it's length.