Blogger's note: Taking a healthy break today from state-sponsored hypocrisy and mayhem. 

The article below was written a couple of years ago and was rejected by some of the glossiest fly-fishing magazines we have. 

Well, it's their loss, damn it. It's a fine piece of literature on an under-addressed topic!

 They Chum Catfish, Don’t They?

 “Catfish are jumpin, that paddlewheel thumpin…”  -- the Doobie Brothers

 

“Summer time, and the livin’ is easy…. Catfish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high” --Janice Joplin version of Scott Joplin’s “Summertime”

 

The seven-pound catfish I caught on a wooly bugger the other day didn’t jump like they do in those songs. But it did fight like an angry badger, resisting arrest for the better part of a half hour.

I’m no Larry Dalberg, hunting for trophies all over the globe, but that seven-pound cat on a six-weight rod almost made me feel like I should get my own show.

All of which begs the question: why do so few people fly-fish for cats?

A lot of it is the aesthetics, I suppose. They aren’t colorful, their faces are only pretty to other cats, and when you grab one it’s like squeezing a baggie full of mashed potatoes.

But what we might call fly angler anti-catism goes deeper, so to speak, than that.  It can be traced back at least to the early 1800s and the cat-fishing antics of one John James Audubon.  The famous bird painter lived for a while in Henderson, Kentucky, and his article, “Fishing in the Ohio,” published in 1835, helped popularize the sort of live bait industrial method of catching cats that still prevails in some quarters.  In the article,Audubon says that for a single outing he first gathered up a hundred live toads (“as good as ever hopped”). He then hooked each one in the back, tethered them all to a long trot-line, tossed them in the river overnight, and returned to harvest them the next day .

“I never could hold a rod for many minutes,” Audubon confesses, perhaps stating the obvious. And he goes on to deprecate the eastern fly angler who “stands or slowly moves along some rivulet… with a sham fly to allure a trout, which, when at length caught, weighs half a pound.”

No wonder people got it in their heads that you could hardly catch a cat without first terrorizing the local population of amphibians or go home smelling like chicken liver.

I wouldn’t blame just Audubon, though. The great fly fishing writers of Western Civilization also have some explaining to do.  Isaac Walton never waxed literary over catfish, nor did any of the other big-name literary fly-anglers I’ve ever come across.  From Hemingway to Lefty Kreh, and on down through the absurdly voluminous fly fishing lore, the literati have, to their everlasting shame, ignored catfish.

A couple of brave bloggers have bucked this tradition. One such is Stu Thompson, a Canadian fly-fishing teacher and multispecies advocate.  He thinks catfish are misunderstood. They are not, for example, mere bottom-feeders. Instead, Thompson writes, “They will actively feed from the bottom to the top of the water column.” Moreover, their diet “is a fly angler’s dream.” It includes “aquatic insects, mayflies, caddis flies, dragon flies,  … crawfish, leeches, forage fish, and frogs.”

On top of all that, catfish are smart. I’m no fan of standardized I.Q. tests, even for fish, but the results of a study at the University of Missouri are compelling. In it, cats finished first over all other species in their “learning ability.”

Thompson, who has fly-fished for dozens of species around the world, thinks the Missouri study is onto something.    Channel cats, he concludes, “are the smartest fish that swims. They are smarter than the most prized fish sought by fly fishermen, trout, which ranked in the lower third of the species tested.”

I would hazard a guess that where I live --Southern Illinois -- is as great a region to fly fish for catfish as there is in the world.  The climate is perfect for channel cats, and the area is loaded with ponds and lakes with catfish in them.  And since, as we’ve seen, they feed on much the same items as bass, bluegill, and crappie, you don’t have to target them too specifically.

One way you could target them, though, if you were so inclined, is with a bit of chum.  I haven’t tried it yet, but keep intending to.  I’ve heard that corn, canned mackerel, or almost anything smelly will work.  I don’t see any shame in it. It’s a lot easier on the toads, and Dollar General’s got mackerel at around a dollar a can.

End

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