Catfishing picks up as summer heat sets in

Mississippi River oxbows, Ross Barnett provide plenty of fishing action.

If there is an upside to the onset of Mississippi’s brutal summer heat, it is that catfish seem to enjoy it. They get more active, and that can lead to their demise. As happens every year in mid to late May, the whiskered fish have turned on and are dominating the fishing reports throughout the Magnolia State.

“We hammered them on jugs and tightlines in an old slough at our deer camp that was created after the 2011 flood,” said Keith Partridge of Terry, who along with sons Austin and Wesley filled a 48-quart cooler with a collection of channel cats, slab crappie and largemouth near Port Gibson. “It was pretty easy fishing. We put out our jugs with nightcrawlers in open water and then fished the banks with a spinnerbait and started picking up the bass and then the crappie. “Every 30 minutes or so, we’d go back and pick up the jugs, and they’d be loaded up with the perfect eating-sized catfish, about 1 to 2 pounds. That slough was enlarged and basically formed by the flood, and I guess all those fish were just left there when the water left.

The bass and the crappie are fun, but the catfish we cleaned produced some of the prettiest fillets and flakiest fish I’ve ever seen. My wife doesn’t really like catfish, but she said these were different and so much better, said they tasted cleaner.” About 80 miles away, and still along the Mississippi River, fishermen at Lake Washington at Glen Allan are hauling off the keeper cats by the bucket full. The key, as usual at this old shallow oxbow, is fishing 2 to 4 feet of water along the banks.

“You can catch them on yo-yos, trotlines and jugs, but we just use (crappie) jig poles and nightcrawlers or liver, and drift through the trees and catch the fire out of them,” said Phillip Green of Vicksburg, who went twice in the last week and said he and his partners put up enough fish for a church fish fry. “Our corks spent more time under water than on the surface, I think. “But this is business as usual at Washington in May.

This lake has always been this way, and I hope always will. But, next week, I’m going to start going to Eagle Lake because it can be just as good and is usually about two weeks behind Washington. The only thing about Eagle is that you are likely to average a slightly bigger fish and, to me, that’s not always a good thing. I like the taste of the smaller fish.” At Barnett Reservoir near Jackson, the slaughter has begun on the mid-level flats in open water and the shallow banks flats in the main lake, the cuts on the river and the stump fields in Pelahatchie Bay.

The flats fishing in open water is the least-utilized and one of the most-productive patterns. This works well on pontoon boats, where canopy tops can provide shade and there is plenty of deck space to put out several poles. My partners and I mix up the bait, using nightcrawlers, cut shad, shrimp and even squid. Oddly enough, the squid and shrimp, when left out to rot a bit in the heat, produce the most action. A nice chunk of smelly squid produced our biggest, a 20-pound blue caught in 10 feet of water next to an immediate drop into 35 feet in the river. At Pickwick Lake, the channels and baby blues have moved up on the rock bluff shelves to spawn in the cracks of the rocks, leading to the annual haul of keeper-sized cats in the 2- to 5-pound range. “It’ll peak over the Memorial Day weekend I bet, because it’s been steady building the last couple of weeks,” said Tommy Davis of Tupelo. “A lot of us still use fly rods and roll cast worms and crickets under a small bobber but you can use just about anything you want.” Read more about fishing Pickwick’s catfish in the May issue of Mississippi Sportsman magazine.

In other fishing news, crappie continue to move deep in most reservoirs and big lakes, returning to deep points and old lake beds and suspending over really deep cover. Bass are tougher to tame. After a slow post-spawn period where it appeared the fish were moving deep, this week produced another shallow bite around vegetation and cover on frogs. “I think it was the cloud cover,” said Dan Smith of Jackson, who fished a couple of small private lakes. “I started deep like I had been catching them, noticed some fish feeding shallow and I went in there. The frogs and swimming jigs lit them up.” The flurry of bass activity that happened at the Mississippi River oxbows Chotard and Albermarle after last week’s rise is slowing now that the level is dropping. Expect that action to continue to slow as the river continues to fall.