Terry Madewell is one of my good buddies, a writer for South Carolina Sportsman who is good at catching or killing just about anything that appears in the SCDNR’s regulations digest.
He’s wanted me to visit him on his home waters, Lake Wateree, to sample its famed catfish action for a long time, and I finally took him up on it last weekend.
June isn’t the greatest month for cats on Wateree, because they’re in transition. Madewell said the blue catfish are moving back into the main lake after spending the spring in the upper section of the lake, spawning, and the channel cats are moving out of the backs of creeks where they’ve been spawning.
Still, it took him only about 15 minutes to find fish – and lots of them.
I brought my friend Brian Hutchins with me; he’s an ardent catfisherman, but I can’t get him to try drift-fishing, having grown up anchoring and fishing holes. I checked with Madewell, and he said drifting should be picking up by the middle of June, and he’d be happy to give Hutchins some lessons.
After six hours on the water, we had a believer in drift-fishing on our hands. You can cover plenty of water, and when you find fish, you can cover the hot areas with a fine-toothed comb.
Fishing with bream heads, white perch heads and an occasional slab of cut shad, we caught around three-dozen catfish, drifting one area in Colonel’s Creek a half-dozen times, getting four or five bites per drift.
Our fish was about 60-40 blues over channels, with the biggest blue weighing 20 pounds, 9 ounces, and the biggest channel pushing six pounds. We had a half-dozen blues in that size range, and a lot of 3- and 4-pound fish.
Hutchins said it took better than 2-1/2 hours to turn the day’s catch into several gallon bags of filets. I expect a fish fry around July 4.
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