Fishing update: New species.

 

Instead of a normal post I decided I would write up another one about my fishing adventures. It's been awhile since I caught a new species and today I caught one. As you can see from the pictures I caught a couple of flathead catfish today! 

I had never caught flatheads before, and I am not exactly sure why. The place I caught them is a place I have fished dozens of times and I hadn't even seen one pulled out of there before. I haven't exactly fished for them though either. Most of the time when I go for catfish I go for channel cats which were common in the river I fish. I mostly used stinky shrimp for them and I caught some big ones. Flathead catfish are more predatory and they tend to go for live bait instead. 

Unfortunately, the river I fish at, the Fox River, had a major channel cat (along with carp and freshwater drum) fish kill that seems to have all but eliminated the big channel catfish that were once so common. Since the fish kill last month I haven't seen an adult channel cat in the river, though I have seen and even caught a few juveniles. 

That has left the river in a state of flux. The white perch young of the year are now everywhere in the river. I believe it's because two of their major predators, channel cats and freshwater drum, died off. That leaves the flatheads and I think they are showing up because there is just so much bait in the water. 

It was funny though, the first flathead I caught was the small molted one pictured above. I was trying to catch some of those white perch for bait on jig and worm combo on my ultralight rod. Though the catfish was tiny, it put up a great fight on my ultralight, to the point that I netted him out of caution. The bigger one was caught on a Carolina rig that was baited with a small white perch. He put up a pretty good fight considering his size and the fact I was using my heavy catfish rod. 

I'm not satisfied with just these fishes though. I know flathead catfish get dramatically bigger than that and I would love to catch a big one. They don't get too big up here in Northeast Wisconsin but I would still like to catch one that was double digits big in size. I have caught channel cats that size but obviously never flatheads.