Rookie Efforts

Our oldest child, the girl, was a colicky baby.  This only helped cement my transition into a nighttime cat guy.  If she was awake, she was crying.  I couldn't really leave the wife to fish knowing that she was dealing with this misery.  I also couldn't just stop fishing.  I worked it out.  I'd stop by the bait shop on the way home from work and load up on sucker minnows and shiners.  I'd put them on an aerator when I got home and then wade into the insane life of a parent with a baby that never stops crying.

We'd finally get her to sleep sometime in the late evening hours and I'd tiptoe out to my Jeep and sneak up to my dad's to get the boat.  The drive to my parents' is about 25 minutes, but they live within 5 minutes of the launch.  I can generally be on the water within an hour of leaving my house.  Often times back then, I was launching just at dark or even after dark.  For this reason I stuck to the area of water close to the launch.  I didn't quite feel confident enough to run the river in the pitch dark and I was getting a lot of worry and warning from my family about fishing alone at night.  I actually got into a lot of fish in this initial area, so I was okay with sticking close to home.

Here's a description.  The water is quite shallow immediately off of the launch.  In the summer when the water is low, we actually have to keep the motor up and use a pole to get to a deeper channel on the other side of the river.  Immediately down river is a small island and the mouth of a smaller river.  During high water conditions, this little area just up from and against the island is a good place to fish for channel cats and other common river fish.  It's off of the main channel, so when most of the river is unfishable, this is a comparably calm spot where the water slows and pools.  There's also some decent wood that is stacked up.  Most of the year it is out of the water, but when we get a lot of rain this turns into prime channel habitat.

The island that I mentioned forms a natural bottle neck in the river, so the channel immediately across from the launch can be productive.  I've caught some nice flatheads in this channel in the early summers.  That bottle neck funnels them right to you.

Just up river is a bridge.  Below the bridge the water ranges from about 8-10 feet.  Most of the area between the bridge and the launch runs 5-7 feet.  We call this the flats.

Just up from the bridge is a pretty big hole that gets up to about 10 feet.  It holds a lot of channels and an occasional flathead.  I've caught some of my biggest fish out of here.

This area around the bridge and launch is where I spent most of my first couple of  years cattin'.  The general set up was to use two 7' spinning rods with medium sized Shimano spinning reels.  Bass gear.  I'd turn the driver seat around and lean the two rods against the back bench.  I'm pretty sure that I just used split shot and a hook.  I hadn't yet discovered the slip rig.  I was experimenting with hooks.  I used a lot of treble hooks, especially for cut bait.  My dad had bought a Mustad catfish hook kit, so I tried the various hooks in there.  I know that I liked the Kahle hook immediately.  I felt like I was sticking the fish pretty regularly with this wide gapped hook.

Most of the time, I'd put out one live minnow and then put half a cut minnow on the other rod.  I liked to start in the hole just under the bridge and then simply pick up the anchor every so often and allow the river to drop me back to a new spot.  I think that this worked out well because it put me onto the flat in the later hours when the channels and flatheads were out cruising.  I don't do this anymore, but I would spend my hours of waiting reading a novel.  I'd turn the old headlamp on and lose myself in some crime story.  I'd look up at my rods occasionally, but I pretty much depended on being able to hear them as the fish pulled them over and then I'd grab them before they went into the drink.  It's a wonder I didn't drown any of those rods. 

The cats sure gave me a good fight on that bass gear.  The channels would race all over the river, pulling drag, and sometimes coming to the surface.  The big flatheads would usually pretty much own me.  I've had them swim past the boat and head right up river.  I even had one break one of those spinning rods.  I tried to horse him in the current and my gear wasn't up to the task.  I sure wasn't sophisticated in those days, but I did learn a lot.  I would soon begin specializing my gear, figuring out bait, and venturing out to see what I could drag out of those snaggy holes.