I was out tonight after dark and had wonderful success. A black size 8 woolybugger on a invis sink tip line, and four feet of flourocarbon leader with some Yum 3x scent on the fly.
The weightless bugger suspends just off the bottom when you use a sink tip line. I can actually catch more cats with my fly rod than my friend gets with a spinning rod and live bait!!! bass will hit the buggers after dark also… and you cover a lot more area when stripping a streamer than you do just sitting bait on the bottom.
oops - missed ya Stephen …
that’s about the size of it for time … busy on my tidbits for Waterside (articles in the works) - have been giving the Red a rest and working on the Assiniboine. Cats are generally smaller - but 30"+ do exist.
Might get to tickle William tomorrow for smallies and browns … yahoo !
as for specifically targetting cats - think sound - cats have one heck of a sensitive lateral line. Sparse tied clousers and buggers (moving water) with contrasting colors to the water (little vis appeal) seem to do the trick.
My catfish on a fly experiences have been as follows:
At the [url=http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/visitorcenters/tffc/:bc45f]Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center[/url:bc45f] in Athens TX at a FlyFish Texas a few years back I was fishing a nymph pattern for rainbows stocked in the big fishing pond. If it got too deep the rainbows got beat out by channel cats. I had a choice of letting it get deep and picking up a cat or speeding up the retrieve to keep it higher in the column and getting a rainbow.
Then at my late father-in-law’s stock tank; early in the wee hours the channel cats prowled the banks, especially up under the willows that overhung the shoreline. They seem to have been prospecting for anything that fell out of the trees or any small baitfish lingering in the shadow. A popper was quite the item. Also, dragging a crawdad pattern along the bottom produced lots of hits. They sure do love crawdads; well I guess I do too!
My thoughts are that the best way to catch one is to scout out where they hang out that is reachable by flyrod and then work the water with a fly that approximates what they like to eat. I know, this sounds corny and simplistic but they really ought to be no different than any other fish. Zoom in on where they are and what they are eating and take it from there.
