First Fish of the Morning - Santee Cooper Catfish

"That's what we want!" Capt. Brett Mitchell said as one of his catfish rods bowed hard. I scrambled to the rod and pried it out of the rod holder, and the fight was underway. Five minutes later, Mitchell slipped the net under what turned out to be a 27 1/2 pound Santee Cooper blue catfish.

We were drifting for blues on the Lower Lake, as Lake Moultrie is most often called in Santee Cooper Country. Photos for un upcoming article on Lurenet.com and fishing fun were the primary objectives. The latter was a given, spending a day on the lake Fishing With Brett. And with the first fish of the day -- a quality catfish -- having been caught, photographed and released before 7:30 a.m., a successful photo day was secured early.

Drifting is a highly efficient way to find actively feeding catfish and is very effective on the open waters of Lake Moultrie. Most catfish anglers drift with cut herring or other baitfish. Mitchell mostly drifts with cut chicken breast, favoring its durability and having found it extremely productive.

We ended up catching about 20 catfish (plus a few big longnose gar). The first fish of the morning was the largest, but the catch included a few in the 10- to 15-pound range. We caught the most fish and the best fish on the chicken, but actually switched to herring after lunch because we ran out of chicken and caught several more catfish on the cut baitfish.

Most cats were blues, with one channel in the mix. Blues are predominant in the open waters of Lake Moultrie and the main fish caught by drifting. It's always fun drifting and watching rods at Santee Cooper because any time one goes down the fish at the other end could way 5 pounds or 50 pounds.

Want to fish Santee Cooper? Blacks Camp can take care of all your needs.

 

Favorite Fishing Destinations Countdown: No. 5 - Santee Cooper Lakes, South Carolina

Time I've spent on the Santee Cooper Lakes spreads across three decades, going back to college days, and I've enjoyed dozens of memorable days fishing these two big South Carolina lakes. Favorite days, were I to attempt to pick a dozen or so, undoubtedly would include days catching flatheads, largemouths, stripers, blue catfish, crappie and bluegills (at least). Opportunities are diverse at Santee Cooper, and it seems that every kind of fish that lives in these lakes is plentiful and grows big.

For folks from other places, the Santee Cooper Lakes are Lake Marion and Moultrie (locally called the Upper Lake and Lower Lake), which are connected by a canal and impound the Santee and Cooper rivers through some complex engineering. The two lakes are distinctive, and each has its own character, but because they are connected and operated together, they tend to be viewed as a single massive (170,000 acres) fishery.  The lakes are fertile and offer highly diverse forage and extensive habitat, resulting in world-class fisheries for multiple species.

Santee Cooper first gained fame as the original home of landlocked striped bass when anadromous fish got trapped during the lakes' construction in the 1940s and ended up surviving and making spawning runs up the rivers. Big catfish are probably the lakes' current largest claim to fame. Folks travel from all over the country to sample Santee Coopers's legendary catfish, and many guides stay busy year-round with catfish trips. Blues and flatheads draw the headlines, but Santee Cooper holds claim to the world record channel cat, and channels still provide a fun opportunity for fast action at certain times. Santee Cooper is also famous for its giant shellcrackers and bluegills, highlighted by a former world-record shellcracker that came from the canal that connects lakes. And then there are the bass and the crappie, which are the main reasons why many anglers travel to these waters year after year.

Fishing is the main attraction for me, and I could go on and on about Santee Cooper angling opportunities. My fondness for the lakes extends far beyond its fisheries, though. I appreciate the variety of settings, from vast swamps at the upper end of Marion and around both lakes to the flooded forest in Marion's main body to the wide open water of Lake Marion. With that comes diverse wildlife, including gators, ospreys, wading birds and much more.

I also enjoy the atmosphere throughout Santee Cooper Country. These are fishing lakes first, and both are serviced by several true fish camps, where an angler can get a cabin or motel room, buy fresh bait and the tackle needed, hire a guide that goes out of the camp's docks, launch a boat and hang out in the restaurant to enjoy big servings of down-home cooking and hear plenty of fish stories.

I've spent many hours in the Black's Camp restaurant, enjoying catfish stew and a burger or a dinner buffet while gleaning wisdom from veteran guides.

Really, the biggest challenge about planning travel to Santee Cooper is figuring out when you would most like to go, which area you want to visit, and what species you want to target. Santee Cooper Country is a great resource to help with the planning. The website provides loads of great information, and if your plans allow you to travel through the town of Santee between 8:30 and 4:30, stop by their visitor center to look around and talk with someone in person.

#VistSanteeCooper

Only One Catfish?

For starters I'll should acknowledge that another post about 2016 indeed means that I've not yet been fishing this year. Not good. That should be reconciled by Tuesday at the latest, but for now please endure one more blog about last year.

It struck me today that while last year's fish tally of 38 species is the largest since I began keeping annual lists (five years), it only includes on species of catfish. My job that I began last year does have me fishing mostly with lures, which doesn't lead to as many cat catches, but I normally take one of my children to a catfish pond, slip in a weekend day for big blues, or at least catch a channel cat or a flathead on a bass lure during a year.

The one catfish I did catch, the big topsail catfish that is pictured above, took an artificial lure while I was fishing for redfish in Venice, Louisiana with tournament angler Keith Bird and his son. We actually caught a few cats that day, including both hardheads and sails, and a couple of them even hit topwater lures. I didn't catch any of the hardheads, though.

My smile is all genuine, by the way. I'm a huge fan of catfish, and when I catch one when I am fishing for something else, I'm never even a tiny bit disappointed. I see it as a bonus, like icing on the cake. Slimy icing. I'll admit that (especially with saltwater cats). But icing nevertheless!

Jug Fishing Lessons

Between living in Georgia and being a big catfish fan, it would seem like I should have some experience fishing jugs for catfish.

Nope.

Until yesterday morning, I'd never done it before. Let me tell you, though, I'm hooked. It will not be the last time. Beyond being wildly efficient, watching for jugs that are standing or bobbing or swimming and then running them down is incredibly fun. When you grab the line, you don't know whether the fish at the other end will weigh 3 pounds or 30 pounds.

Of course it helped that I got to go with Tony Adams, who is knows Lake Eufaula catfish like few other people and has a refined jug fishing system, and with Eufaula mayor Jack Tibbs, who is also am expert on the lake. It didn't hurt that we had perfect weather and the fish were really biting.

Tomorrow night brings another first -- bow fishing, and I'm definitely looking forward to giving that a try!

New Toy/Tool

I aded a camera to my toolbag yesterday and am excited to put it to work. The hope, of course, is that I'll get to out it to very good use on some extra large catfish in Tennessee this evening.

Camera is a Fujifilm Finepix S1. It's a point-and-shoot, which admittedly feels a little like a step backward. I really don't think it is, though. It has a giant optical zoom range and fast lens, shoots up to 16 MP and offers the option of shooting raw and a lot of control settings. Extra appealing for today's communication needs, it shoots high def video, has Wifi to work with my phone and has a huge variety of specialty settings for effects.

Learning to navigate the new camera's menus and figuring out the best settings for different situations is going to take some time, but from the little bit of playing I have done I'm excited about prospects.

For now, two batteries are fully charged, and a 64-gig card is loaded and ready. And of course I also have my other cameras charged and ready for action!

Monster Appointment on Friday

 

Tennessee River Monsters has been on a great bite this week,
with 10 cats over 40 pounds in four days. Photo courtesy
of Tennessee River Monsters

Monster time begins Friday afternoon.

That's when I'm meeting Capt. Scott Manning of Tennessee River Monsters to fish the fertile waters of the Tennessee River for monster cats. He's been on them this week -- 10 that weighed more than 40 pounds in four days -- and nothing about weather or likely generation schedules suggests that the bite should change. Rain chance is 40 percent every day between now and then, with scattered afternoon thunderstorms possible, so that is the biggest question mark right now.

Tennessee River Monsters specializes in heavyweight blues and flatheads, plus trophy stripers, on the Tennessee River, between Knoxville and Chattanooga. From what I've seen, we'll use oversized baits for overgrown fish, so any fish that bites is apt to be that monster we're looking for. We'll most likely begin in the afternoon and fish through the evening and on into the night.

I'm an "everything that swims" sort of fisherman, and every style of fishing has its own appeals. Big cats rank high on my favorites list, though, and it's been too long since I've gone after them. I also don't have a blue or a flathead on this year's species list. Most importantly, I really need to freshen my big cat photo files and I'm excited to learn more about how Capt. Manning likes to fish.

I'm also excited about the likely opportunity to play with a new camera. I say likely because it is supposed to arrive tomorrow. More on that to follow, though.

Thursday Tips: Start Small with Bait

"Let's start with small pieces of herring and see if we can get a good bite going," said Kevin Davis of Blacks Camp. "Then, if they start biting well, we'll go a little bigger to see if that gets us a bigger fish."

A multi-species fishing guide and co-owner of Blacks Camp on the Santee Cooper lakes, Davis commonly applies a "start small" strategy whether he's casting lures for bass, dragging cut bait for cats or dangling minnows for crappie. There are exceptions. Occasionally when Davis knows the fish he's targeting are eating big stuff, or he's specifically targeting colossal cats or extra big bass, he'll begin big. Usually, though, Davis finds that he gets more early action by erring on the small size of the bait range for whatever he is doing, and that helps him to locate fish and figure out patterning details that help him present the bigger baits more effectively later in the day and increase his changes of finding big fish for his clients.

Of course, at times he stays small. If there has been a mussel die-off, for example, and the blue cats are all eating little pieces of meat from dying mollusks, it's hard to get even he biggest cat to bite a big piece of cut bait. And while Davis will occasionally drop a big minnow or even a live herring for crappie, he has caught far more serious slabs on small minnows than on bigger baitfish.

Lots of variables come into play, but the short answer from Kevin Davis is that when you're talking about bait, bigger isn't always better.

Variety is the Spice of Santee Cooper Fishing

Yesterday's plan included probing deep-water brush for crappie and bluegills and drifting the canal with cut bait for blue cats in the current.

This afternoon we will set up over deep water in lower Lake Moultrie and fish live herring on down lines for big blues and stripers. However, we could just as well be going up onto shallow ponds around Marion or Moultrie to cast for largemouths or pitch worms under floats for shellcrackers or gearing up big with perch and gills in the bait tank to hunt flatheads.

One of my favorite things about the 180,000-acre Santee Cooper system (and there are many!) is the sheer variety of types of opportunities that are available pretty much all the time.  So many species abound in these lakes and grow to big sizes, but the variety extends way beyond the species mix because any given kind of fish can be caught many different ways.

Really the hardest thing about fishing down here for me is deciding which fun thing I want to do any given day!

Jig a Spoon for Winter Fishing Action

Without much question, a jigging spoon ranks one of the best lures made for winter fishing, and it produces pretty much every kind of fish that ever eats shad or herring. Find a good group of baitfish near the bottom in a  wintering area, and you're apt to catch white bass, stripers, bass, catfish and more. A simple hand-poured and painted white spoon is one of Gary Dollahon's mainstay lures during the winter, and he catches pretty much everything that swims on his spoons. Dollahon looks for areas near the mouths of major creeks, where hard bends create wind protection from multiple directions and form holes that offer the baitfish and the gamefish a nice range of depths to use. The fish can be down in the channels or up on the structure, so he normally does quite a bit of looking with his electronics and drops a marker buoy before he begins fishing. Dollahon also mixes up his presentations for different situations. The video below demonstrates a "shaking" strategy that Dollahon finds especial;y productive when the water turns extra cold.

Oklahoma Fish Medley

Gary Dollahon enjoys catching any kind of fish that wants to bite, including Lake Fork largemouths like this one, but this week's quest will center on home waters in Oklahoma.

Gary Dollahon has been telling me about one of his favorite seasonal bites for a few years now, and we've finally made plans for me to travel his way and try it for myself. Gary I both enjoy catching whatever wants to latch onto the other end of a line, and that's a major part of the appeal of the brand of winter fishing that he and I will be doing. We'll be jigging for fish that pod up together when the water gets cool, and the fish that tug on the other end could range from white bass to colossal blue catfish. Fishing is still fishing, so you never know for sure, but Gary anticipates fast action from a pretty good mix of species.

Beyond being big fun, catching a variety of fish gives me a great opportunity to gather photos, videos and material for magazine stories -- and to put some Lew's rods and reels to the test! The plan also includes time chasing crappie with Bobby Garland pro Kevin Rogers, which will most likely involve some different angling approaches.

I fly to Tulsa tomorrow and will be fishing Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. As always, I'll do my best to deliver fresh reports from where I'm fishing and to convey some of what I learn, so keep an eye on my blog. I also like to add notes and photos to Twitter when I travel and invite you to follow (@jeffsamsel).