Catfish Corner

Tar Heel catfish anglers who know S.C. tactics can drift fish for big numbers and trophy size fish at Lake Gaston.

If Scott Van Horn is public enemy No. 1 to Lake Gaston’s catfish, you’ll have to forgive him. If he hadn’t talked, thousands more of them would be alive.Of course, those fish would be alive if they hadn’t opened their mouths, but that’s not part of the story.

Van Horn, a fisheries biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, was innocently trying to help a few fishermen in the Durham area when he spoke to the local “Catching Crappie Club” meeting one night several years ago.

A couple of guys in the club, Richard Amidon and Walter Young, were lamenting the five-hour drive to South Carolina’s Santee Cooper reservoirs, a trip they made several times a year in search of big catfish — blues ands flatheads.

With none of the lakes in the immediate vicinity of the Raleigh-Durham area carrying good populations of those species, Van Horn suggested Lake Gaston along the North Carolina-Virginia border. The blue catfish were really doing well there, Van Horn said, and there were plenty of big ones.

Almost immediately, Young planned a trip. He trailered his boat an hour up I-85 and spent a couple of days fishing with his son.

“The first day, we only caught two fish — a 38-pounder and a 42-pounder,” Young said. “The next day, we caught 26, and the biggest was 18.”

Right away, Amidon joined in the fun.

Shortly after that, several members of the “Catching Crappie Club” got together and rented mobile homes at a secluded Lake Gaston cove, and Santee Cooper was only a memory.

“Scott said, ‘Why don’t you try Gaston; there are some big catfish there?’ but we figured we probably couldn’t fish the lake the way we drifted Santee,” Amidon said. “But once we got up there and started fishing, we could do the same things we’d been doing at Santee and catch fish.

“We haven’t been back to Santee since Scott came to talk to the club and we rented that little yellow trailer at Gaston.”

In the four years since Van Horn’s talk, Amidon, Young and company have taken thousands of blue catfish out of Gaston. Fillets from blues weighing 10 pounds have graced tables at soup kitchens and rescue missions at Durham, and Amidon just finished supplying fish for a benefit dinner his church was having to help fund a mission trip.

“The striper fishermen up here get a little irritated with us because we put all the big fish back,” said Young, whose club members have caught blue catfish at Gaston up to 55 pounds. “Of course, the president of one of the striper clubs called us one time and asked if we could show ’em how we catch catfish.”

The two fishing buddies — Young taught Amidon how to fish for catfish more than 10 ago — said it’s fairly easy to teach other fishermen how to catch the big blues that live in 20,500-acre Lake Gaston, which straddles the Virginia-North Carolina line northeast of Henderson.

They catch Gaston’s catfish the way fishermen have caught blues at Santee Cooper for decades — drifting cut bait across contour changes along the lake’s bottom, using a rig known at Santee as the “Carolina driftmaster” — a snap swivel attached to a sinker sliding up and down the line, which is tied to a barrel swivel, to which is also tied a leader with a Carolina cork threaded onto the line about halfway between the swivel and the business end of the line — a live-bait hook.

With that simple rig in place, fished with medium-light bait-casting tackle, Young and Amidon fish pieces of cut shad, strips the size of a man’s thumb cut from the sides of bigger shad, or small white perch they’ve caught — with the tail and backbone removed, allowing “filets” from both sides to swim naturally along the bottom.

“We drift exactly the way the Santee guys taught us 15 years ago, but we’ve refined it a little bit to fit our pontoon boats,” Young said. “If I fish seven rods, I can make a path 38-feet wide going across the lake.”

Amidon uses a half-dozen 7 1/2-foot medium-light Ugly Stick bait-casting rods matched with ABU 6500 CL reels spooled with 25-pound-test green Stren mono. He uses clear leader material, normally 18 inches worth, tied to a 4/0 or 5/0 Eagle Claw Style 42 hook – a live-bait or Kahle-style hook.

The cork that’s threaded onto the leader keeps the bait a few inches off the bottom as it floats along behind the sinker. That’s important, because it forces catfish to make a quick decision.

“If you keep the bait on the bottom, he’ll get on top of it and rub his barbels across it and be able to smell it and taste it,” Amidon said. “The length of your leader determines how high it rides off the bottom.”

Amidon runs a strip of yellow tape around the butt of rods fishing strip baits, black tape around rods that are fishing whole shad heads, and no tape around the rods that have normal cut bait.

Amidon fishes a mixed spread of different baits, working each day to figure out which bait the catfish prefer.

“I like big baits, but I think you can catch big catfish with baits no bigger than a little threadfin shad,” he said. “Catfish are opportunistic feeders; they have to eat when it comes by or let it go.

“That’s why I put out a smorgasbord of bait. I know it sounds crazy, because people think ‘catfish’ and ‘it doesn’t matter what you throw out, they’ll eat it,’ but that’s not so. Fish might bite shrimp today, shad tomorrow.

“Shad is the most common forage on most of our lakes. I’ll cut strip baits the size of my thumb out of big shad or white perch, and I’ll cut different-sized chunks of bait out of shad.”

Amidon and several other club members will stop at Falls of the Neuse Lake on their way out of Durham, filling their cast nets with gizzard shad caught near the Cheek Road Bridge rip-rap. Once at Gaston, Amidon rises well before dawn, cast net in hand, and heads to a bridge at one of the lake’s feeder creeks. When power generation starts at Gaston Dam, setting up a strong current, threadfin shad flock to those areas, and Amidon can get 60 or 75 shad with a few throws of his net.

“You have to go down before the sun’s up and be there when they’re drawing water,” he said. “You’ve got about a one-hour time frame when the water will be moving; you’ve gotta be there.”

Besides fishing in the best areas, with the right rigs, Amidon said fishing with fresh bait is the single most-important factor in catfish success. He always has more than enough bait for an entire day when he hits the water.

“A lot of times the fish will tell you what kind of bait they prefer,” Young said. “We vary the size of bait we use, and we don’t always drag it along the bottom. We may use as little as a ½-ounce sinker or as much as an ounce. You can keep it closer to the bottom with a heavier sinker.”

Getting the right drift is a key. Young and Amidon keep wind socks tied to the Bimini tops on their pontoons to get an idea of the wind direction — which can change on a minute-to-minute basis. They plan their fishing locations and tactics based upon wind direction, hoping to be able to set up a downwind drift that will take them through a likely area. And they work on keeping their boats drifting along at a half mile per hour. That takes plenty of work.

“I use my GPS unit for two reason,” Amidon said. “If we start catching fish, I can put the spot in the GPS, but most important, I want to know how fast I’m drifting. I want to maintain about a half-mile-an-hour drift.”

His main weapons in the war against the wind — breezy winds can move his pontoon boat across the lake at a rather quick clip — are a set of four “drift socks,” parachute-shaped pieces of fabric that he ties to the side of his boat and tosses overboard on the side of the wind. The drift socks catch water and slow down the boat’s drift. Amidon can use any of four different sizes, or more than one at a time, to get to his half-mile-an -hour drift.

“As the wind changes in the afternoon, you can change the size of your chute or the size of your weight to keep your bait near the bottom,” Amidon said. “I’ll start out in the morning with a small chute and a half-ounce weight. I may wind up with a big chute and a three-quarter-ounce weight, or even the biggest chute and a bigger weight.”

Young and Amidon put out a spread of baits at the upwind side of the boat, fan-casting them out in a semi-circle so they can cover the entire area surrounding the boat. As the drift starts, the baits bounce along the bottom, often for a half-mile or so — then they start over.

So they use cut bait, use multiple rods and drift at a certain speed.

Where do they drift?

Young said he and Amidon typically drift across areas that have distinct depth changes, drifting above the edges of channels or humps. Almost all of their drifting, especially during the summer, is done on the main lake, three miles on either side of Eaton’s Ferry Bridge in the mid-lake area.

“You drift across any depth change — channels, drops or humps,” Young said. “Normally, we catch our fish from 15- to 27-feet deep. There are a couple of humps we fish that if fish are on ’em, they’re feeding.”

Amidon and Young pick their drifts based upon wind direction and what kind of changes in bottom contours they can cross in a certain area. That’s one big reason why they restrict their fishing to a 6-mile-long area on a lake that’s more than 20 miles from dam to dam.

“If you know the lake real well, that’s a big plus factor, especially when you’re fishing for catfish,” Amidon said. “They like water at drops, where the bait moves in and sets up. There’s about a 6-mile section of this lake I know real well. If you know the lake, you know where all the drops are.”

If he can get the right wind, Amidon can set up at one bank in about 15 feet of water, put out his baits and drift sock, and drift all the way across the main Roanoke River channel. He gets to bounce his baits down one drop as he comes off a main-river flat into the channel, then drag them back up the drop as he comes out of the channel. Most of his bites, he said, usually occur near one of the drops.

There’ll be no mistake about some of the bites. A big catfish can bury the tip of one of the rods that Young or Amidon use all the way into the water, even when it’s in a rod-holder mounted at the rail of the pontoon. But a fish may also cruise along with the drift, mouthing the bait, before swallowing it. That happens a lot with strip baits, Amidon said, and is one reason he and Young use Kahle-style live-bait hooks.

“We’d use circle hooks, but the problem with them is that most people are impatient and won’t let the fish pull the rod all the way down,” he said. “We stick with Kahle hooks, and you get more hookups, and you still get the hook in the corner of their mouths.”

The one thing that can mess up anglers targeting big blues is a total lack of wind. When that occurs, Young and Amidon have their boats rigged for a specific purpose — with a small, kicker outboard on the transom next to their big outboard.

They’ll set rods off the bow, normally four of them, hang a drift sock off the bow, point the stern in the direction they want to drift, crank up the kicker motor and put it in reverse. The combination of the little outboard and the drift sock will keep the boat moving in a relatively straight line.

That allows Amidon and Young to drift areas with the right kind of bottom contours, and occasionally, when big catfish move shallow during summer, to fish shallow areas they like.

“In the summer, catfish can be just like crappie,” Amidon said. “They’ll go shallow when the (dissolved) oxygen gets tough. Fish can get lethargic, and you need to go as slowly as you can.

“You start out drifting over deep water, and if you don’t find any fish, you move shallow. I like to move. If I drift and catch fish, I’ll make that drift again. If I don’t catch fish, I’ll make a change, and it might be a drastic change.”

Amidon said Young discovered catfish will orient at the outside edges of hydrilla beds that cover much of Gaston’s shallows during the summer. Normally, hydrilla, an exotic, aquatic grass, grows in large mats from the bank out to about 10 feet of water, where the deep side of the grass forms a distinct edge.

Young and Amidon now know to put out four rods — two on the bow rail and one on the rail on each side of the gunwale at the bow — and throw out a drift sock, put the small kicker engine in reverse and “slow troll” down the outside edge of the grass, letting their baits cover areas anywhere from 12-, 15- or 16-feet deep.

How good is the fishing? Amidon said 30-fish days aren’t unusual.

Typically, club members who fish with Amidon and Young catch between 10 and 20 fish a day. The average fish will run between 3 and 7 pounds.

More big fish are caught during the spring and the fall, and in those seasons, it’s not unusual to see fish in the 20-pound class or bigger. During the summer, Amidon said a 15-pound blue is a good one.

“During the summer, if you catch 30, you’re doing pretty good because it tapers off a little after the spring,” Amidon said. “But you can still catch a lot of fish.”

Occasionally, club members will stumble onto a channel cat, but more likely, their daily creel will be almost all blue cats.