some river kitties

well this past weekend I headed out friday right after work to go camping on the local river with my wife, some friends, and their kids. I brought my bank poles along and figured if I was staying on the river over night I'd run some poles to put some catfish in the freezer. I put out 15 poles used some little shad for bait I managed to get in my cast net. Early on friday evening one of the first fish I got was quiet the surprise was a pretty darn big flat head. When I came up to the pole it was bouncing all of the place felt like troy in swamp people pulling up to a tree shaker. Was a bit of a chore to get him netted and into the boat. Pull the hook from him took a pic and let him go big ones like that I let go hopefully we may meet again when he is even bigger. Would have like to have him on the end of line on a rod and reel.

Anyways ended up with 6 good eating size channel cats that kept, I had one more flat head that wasn't very big. I let the little flat head go so he could hopefully one day be the size of the one I caught earlier. usually when catfishing I primarily keep channels as they just don't have the size potential of the flat heads. The flat heads can become quiet the trophy size fish, channels can get pretty big, but they just don't grow to the size of flats or blues. Even so on channels a 25" one is about as big as I like to keep any bigger they have a lot of red fatty meat that doesn't taste good that I trim off. Anyways was a fun night kept checking the lines every hour to two hours till just after midnight at that point I rebaited them and let them sit till morning. Each round of checking rendered around two fish.

Nice Fish. I like to eat the ones that are in the neighborhood of 2 pounds. I feel the smaller ones are not worth the trouble and when they get much over 2 pounds they tend to have a head that is much larger in comparison to their body. It seems the ones over 50 pounds seem to be all head to me.

I'll keep flatheads now and again but I usually let them go as they don't seem as abundant, and can grow to be some monsters. My rule on channel cats unless it's a rough day is 25" and below. They have to be at least 10" to keep here legally, but I wouldn't want to bother filleting one any smaller anyways.

This is a species I wish CT would spend more time developing in the local waters as it should be able to establish self-sustaining populations.

Instead they chose to keep up the pounding the square peg into the round hole exercise that is stocking trout into waters that regularly reach the mid 80's during the summer.

Indiana does that some too, we have some areas with strip pit lakes they aren't large but have decent depth for the size. They stock trout in during the fall most are catch and release of trout till after christmas, but at that point you can keep them. They do it more so to offer catch and take for winter time angling when our other normal species aren't as active.