Labor Day Catfishing

My dad and I have not been able to fish for catfish in a long time. I have a new house, a new baby and a lot less free time. We finally set aside sometime Monday morning to fish. We got to the lake at 5:45 AM. I spent about 15 minutes catching some bait. We caught about 40 shad and perch. We launched the boat about 6 and got on the lake. The boat we were in was a small two man boat with only a trolling motor so we couldn't go far. We went about 200-250 yards from the shore. We put 9 jugs in the water baited with shad.

The sun started to come up and a lot of fish were hitting the top of the water. We saw gar, bass and carp surfacing. There were a lot of shad also swimming around. We had 4 rods in the water baited with shad as well. I caught a Sandbass on one of the poles. He hit the shad as it was going down. Shortly afterward one of the jugs started bobbing up and down. We went to check it and it was about a 3 pound Blue Catfish on it. We started fishing again and got a few bites and missed any hook sets. Another one of the jugs we had set out began to bob up and down as we went to check it and had this small channel fish on it. A few minutes later another jug was bobbing a lot. We knew it was a bigger fish. When we checked it we had this roughly 5 pound Blue Catfish on it. One more jug began bobbing and we managed another small Channel Catfish. We fished another hour or so but winds picked up and some skiiers decided they would ruin our fishing by skiing within a few hundred feet of us nearly knocking our boat over. We called it a day. It was a nice little trip to spend some time with my dad.

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