Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking flathead catfish declining?

not sure if this is the bets forum t ask this but i notice in all fishing vids and as well as people who fish they can catch plenty of bluecats n channels all day but flatheads u may catch 1 every 10 fish that tells me that flathead numbers must be very low almost endangered i wonder why as blues get bigger and can eat big fish just like the flatheads

why else do people not catch flatheads near in numbers of blues when msot anglers use live fish

I dont think its a matter of numbers, Matt. Unlike blues and channels, flathead dont travel in schools. They are predominently solitary fish and very nomadic. My dad supplimented his inclome rather well selling river run cats. We had over 1000 hooks in the water at all times, crossing the river on trotlines up and down the Calcasieu River. We'd follow the schools up and down, and hardly ever caught a flathead, primarily I think because they dont haunt the same areas.

Flats prefer stiller water, with less current. If my dad wanted to catch a flathead, he'd set special line for them in the backs of bays and bait strictly with live bait, usually, BH or BG.

The reasoning is sound that you dont catch near as many flatheads is because they just aren't there in the same numbers as BC or CC.

i get that but still the numbers r insane that guys can catch blues at like 10-1 flathead or more.


i just found a great spot on a creek about 30-45 feet wide im gonna set out some poles with cut bait and maybe a few live sunfish ect in hopes of catching some flatheads. so your saying t target the flats to avoid any part of the creek with current?

i know flatheads dont like current but since u have experience with this curious how u think i should try n catch them with poles stuck in the bank

someone is really obsessed with flatheads...

sure am dying t taste them everyone claims how amazing the meat is they also look cooler than other catfish and the fact they eat live fish ambush type predators is cooler its like a bass

just sucks that its hard t catch but i guess it makes them more of a prized catch when u finally nail one sadly most flatheads u catch r usually above 10 pounds

It's not that they don't like current, just not typically hard flowing current. If you want to catch flathead, nix the cut bait, you're wasting your time. Go with live 100%.

They absolutely love Bullhead (but BG work as well) The bigger the better. If my dad caught one on the lines, he would leave it on the line hoping a flathead might find it, but not before changing to a larger hook and hooking the BH thru the tail.

I'm not saying you wont catch flathead out in river current, you will, we've caught them in hoop nets occasionally but your odds go up dramatically if you can find some back/slack water. Deep holes in creeks are good too, as they will lay on the bottom or in the undercut banks in a bend.

When I was just a youngster back in Indiana, I knew a guy that spent a lot of his summer nights fishing for FHC. His go to bait was live 10 to 12 inch suckers. He fished exclusively from shore at night and used light deep sea tackle. He never started fishing much before 10 or 11 PM. He caught some monsters!

You just need to figure out how to target them. Links are to local forum, the lake is 100% catch and release on FHC. In the fall flatheads will stack up like cord wood in deep holes.

https://www.nefga.org/forum/fishing-and-hunting/nebraska-fishing-forum/1217067-thump-em-tues

https://www.nefga.org/forum/fishing-and-hunting/nebraska-fishing-forum/1217084-wack-em-wed

https://www.nefga.org/forum/fishing-and-hunting/nebraska-fishing-forum/1217160-turkey-day-beat-down

im trying t hopefully target smaller ones for eating sized not anything real big dont have the tackle for that atm anyways also the creek isnt very big so prob biggest fish in it may b 50 pounds if i had t guess which is good

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Meridian+Regional+Airport/@32.2983579,-88.753614,83m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8884808a72105c97:0xe89fd8e6a477b166!8m2!3d32.333547!4d-88.7451526



this is wher eim gonna b fishing its the biggest part of the whole creek in the city so it has to be the best part it has some nice white sandy beach places too which u can swim when its higher

anyways how would u fish this part im gonna move up and down within 100 yards or so tomorrow i plan t go put out my bak poles and a few rods to catch cats n crappie sunfish

Matt,

Have you confirmed that there are flatheads in the creek? Not all creeks and rivers have them.

yes the 2 flatheads iv ever caught in life were in here it def has them the creek forms from the spillway of the citys rez so ti has everything

Ok so you will be fishing during the day. From the picture, it doesn't look like you have any quiet, deep back waters to fish so, IME, I would fish the deeper holes and just up stream of snags (downed tree, etc.). At night they are on the move so less fussy about where you fish. Like Mike said, live bait is your best bet. IMO the most important thing is be patient!!! One of those cats may look at a bait for an hour or 3 before he decides to take it! They didn't get big by being stupid.

Sounds like Mike Whatley has a lot of experience. Maybe he or others can offer better advice.

its so difficult to not get hung up fishing in logs downed trees ect though especially from a bank maybe its the rig people use which makes it easier for them tbh i usually tie a 2-3 oz weight about 10 inches above my hook

Matt,

I don't fish in the snag. I fish a little upstream from it. The current will carry the smell of your bait into the snag and draw the fish laying in the snag upstream to the bait.

This time of year find the deepest hole you can find, it will up your odds of catching a flathead.

I will have to ask one of my relatives that does a lot of river fishing about the flathead situation on the White River here in Ark. He catches a lot of fish with troutlines and nets. I know people over this way catch some but haven't asked about what they were doing.

If your Cahunnas are large sized then try a little noodleling in and around the log jam or look for a cavern in steep banks or under boat ramps where you can run your hand into the holes. My friend says at the end of boat ramps there will be a hole, washed out by boat motors and high winds. This is favorite place to hand fish. If the hole is too deep, he will use a bamboo pole, tie a treble hook tight to the pole, then tie on a few ribbons to the hook. The fish will bite the ribboned hook, he said he is not snagging the fish. Said he can feel the fish hit the hook.

As teenagers we went hand grabbing. A friend stuck his hand in an anticipated catfish hole in the bank. He yelled and pulled out his hand with a large water moccasin attached. By the time we could get him to the hospital he was in and out of conciseness. Stayed there a week and lost 2 fingers and part of his hand.

im to much of a wuss to hand grab afraid of turtles ect also im targeting smaller fish usually when hand grabbing its for fish above 20 pounds i dont mind catching a big fish obviously but im going to catch fish for a good fish fry rather than sport

I had the pleasure to do a little noodling/grabbling when I lived in TN. The guys that invited me built hollow rock piles when the water was down in the winter and visit them when the cats were spawning. We'd wear heavy gloves and stick our hands in the entrance. If there was a fish in the hole it'd almost immediately hit your fingers....quite un-nerving to the inexperienced. Then you'd just have to keep messing with it till it finally latched onto your hand then wrestle it out.

We also used the stick/hook method, but we'd have the end of the stick split, and the hook was tied to heavy fishing line on a rod back in the boat. Once the fish was excavated, you pull the stick off and let the guy on the rod have him.

We never caught a flathead noodling, just CC and BC. A 20# BC with half your hand in his mouth is one heck of a rush!! Just unlucky on the flatheads on the trips I made, but I got some good stories to tell!

I wouldn't dare try noodling down here in the swamp....for obvious reasons.

same ehre we caught a alligator snapping turtle over 50 pounds in that same creek i posted id def nevrrrr try noodling there tbh i dont even feel safe swimming there due to snapping turtles beer bottle glass and giant gar that might bite my foot lol

Eric, this is the reason I have never tried it, even though I have been invited to go along. It's not small cahonnas its large brain

+++ mind over mayhem.

id also b afraid of a big fish like that finning the hell out of me imagine a 40+ flatehads fin sticking into your arms


o me its so much more fun t catch them on a rod than going t grab them unless ur doin it to harvest the meat

I know a lot of people enjoy the sport of noodling, but I'm not putting myself through that task unless something is ending up in a skillet of hot oil!!

Flatheads are certainly not on the decline.

They have been introduced to waters where they are not native, have flourished there, and have even been declared an "invasive species" in some parts.

so you think there are just as many flatheads as there are blues in most places that house both naturally

I'll just say, I've never found Flatheads in big numbers anywhere. Even when limb lining in backwater bayous with live bait, I've always caught more BC/CC than Flatheads. I dont know why, but their niche in the ecosystem has never required large numbers, which is probably a good thing. If their numbers were as high as CC/BC, there wouldn't be anything else to fish for. A 10# spot will eat anything up to 5#.

Flathead numbers are good, but not as good as blue catfish, because flatheads occupy a niche habitat in cover. Blues are more open water foragers.

yeah there is now ay there are as many flats as blues n channels or wede catch more sucks though i wana eat them bad but your lucky t catch just one sadly i hear bluecats r the worst tasting of the 3 so looks like im gonna target 1-3 pound channels n flatheads

just got done cleaning and cooking my catch today man i butchered the hellll out of the fillets i was so mad lol when u fillet one side flip the fillet over to then fillet the skin off i just couldnt get it to work ended up losing a lot of meat sadly but still got a good solid meal i set out 6 cane poles n caught a pregnant 4 pound channel cat im sad that i had t kill a pregnant channel cause she could have stocked the creek


didnt have any good bait had t use crappie sided minnows sadly so ended up only catching the 1 catfish and 2 small spotted bass that i cut up n froze for my next trip man filleting is harder than n the vids lol

https://imgur.com/a/fGI7P1n


heres the before pic


https://imgur.com/a/NOt86fw

after those were the fillets man wish i could somehow practice without ruining my fish lol she had 2 big crawfish in her stomach that she swallowed whole

Try a Townsend Fish Skinner. Lots of how to use videos on youtube and cheap to buy on ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/b/Townsend-Fish-Scalers-Skinners/179991/bn_84955278

huh hope it works alot better than the old school fish skinners or needle nose flyers

Get you a good pair of skinning pliers and skin them before you try to fillet the flesh off the bone. Catfish dont fillet like scaled fish....believe me.

Cut the skin just behind the eyes, across the head and around to under the gill plate. Catch the skin at the cut and pull down to the tail. There will be a small V of skin left on the belly that you'll need to strip back up to the head.

A large heavy hook works really good to hang them on, stuck thru the bottom lip. We had a 2x6 mounted to a tree with 2 hooks on it, one on each end so we could double up on cleaning for market. We didn't fillet many, because we wanted the extra weight, but if someone asked specifically for fillets, the price went up.

Wish I could show y’all how to filet all fish . I’m not real fast anymore but I get most of the meat and no bones. I don’t skin catfish cause it leaves the sinew on the filet and if you fry it it curls up , plus leaves the blood line in

+1 to what Pat said. I will skin smaller ones and cook on the bone. We call them fiddlers. Once they get much size that sinew membrane and blood line pretty much ruins the taste. There should be nothing but white meat left on the fillets. I cut off sinew, blood line and yellow meat.

I also agree that filleting the skin off a cat is a PITA. I almost always cut thru the skin. Thankfully, my bride is good at it!

Bill try starting at the thick end3-4” back cutting towards the thick end, repeat til done. What bloodline is left cut out leaving nice clean fish

i really loathe having t skin them hope i can get the hang of it without having t do that its strange when i first tried to cut into the fish i couldnt tell when i hit the backbone was hard to fully tell but i got it.

but when you flip the fillet over to fillet the skin the knife cut into the fillet but it wouldnt come off for some reason i got the 14 dollar knife people recommended from walmart maybe i should have tried to get the rapila 50 dollar one

When my wife removes the fillet from the skin on CC, unlike where you move the knife along between the flesh and skin on scale type fish, she keeps the knife stationary and pulls the skin toward her moving it back and forth as she pulls. Other than this technique, she fillets them pretty much the same as BG. That is with fish in the 2 to 5# range. We like to harvest the CC at 2-3# ideally, unless she wants to smoke it then the larger fillets work better.

Seems like if you move the knife along rather than pulling the skin through, it is much to easy with a sharp knife to cut through the skin.

She is the CC cleaner. I fillet lots of BG but leave the CC to her.

Have never cleaned a flathead, though we have them here in the larger rivers.

Matt, I have bought the cheap electric knife from Walmart but they never last very long. I bought the Rapila and it works wonderful. It has a lot more power and the only thing I had to do is to replace the blades.

yeah i caught 5 more yesterday n tried t fillet them again i did a lil better but still i dislike this knife i think fastest best way is for me t skin them then fillet.

i watched a few vids on how t skin them i thought it was much harder than it was so from now on ll do that whats weird is every single catfish i caught had eggs all 6 of them hopefully i dont put a huge dent in the growing population


i not gonna keep anymore for awhile since apparently right now is when the females are pregnant

They develop eggs over winter but don't nest until the water warms into the mid 70's consistently.

do you think that someone can fish a creek/small river out? my local resivour feeds it and it runs into another bigger river was curious if i should watch what i harvest from it? not sure how fishing creeks work i know n lakes u gotta watch certain fish species like bass catfish due t low numbers i usually kill bowfin and gar if i catch them t help the catfish bluegill population

We have a creek that drys completely up each year and you can catch 15 pound flathead cats in it. I would say as soon as you get a high water event the cats move upstream and repopulate any good hole in the creek.IMO

thats gotta be awesome yeah this never drys up there are parts of it that dry up but im at the deepest widest part i searched the whole map and found the widest part luckly its a great spot but i have to walk down a railroad track half a mile to get to it but its worth it carrying fishout half a mile and 5 rods though by yourself isnt very fun lol

i havnt caught a flatty yet cause iv only used cut spotted bass so far but im gonna try some crayfish and see if they will bite

You do know using gamefish as bait is frowned upon by the local authorities, dont you? Some states even protect BG from using them as bait. Check your local regs. Hate to see you get a ticket for fishing illegally.

i doubt theyd care on this i now get my bait from a lake i posted in another thread i made called oxbowlakes its from water run off from a park in the city

the lakes about 300 acres and has a trial all the way around it and somehow formed an oxbow lake on the right and its full of super stunted warmouth and bullheads when i say stunted i mean they hardly have a belly its sunk in and around 3 inches long lol i started to throw dog food ect into the water to help but realized only bullheads will eat it as warmouth like fish and worms

anyways yeah these fish r quite misrible ill show you a pic of the oxbow

https://imgur.com/a/dR5Dsn4


its a bit of a walk but can usually catch a fish every 15 seconds but y god they are some tiny ones i went the otherday to check it out 10 years ago i went to fish it randomly ad i caught some good sized bulls and warmouths 0 bluegill but now iv only caught tiny ones even to small to hit my size 8 cricket hooks i wonder if they died out or what

i guess the reason theres no bluegill n crappie is due to the bad water and that bullheads n warmouth can live in harsh condiitons

+1 for the Rapala Fish N Fillet Knife. I bought it to take fishing didn't want to spend a fortune this fits my needs. The sheath is awesome.

its just a bit over my budget cost 50 bucks hell a rapila regular fillet knife is 12bucks

This issue with using cut gamefish you're going to run into is proving where they came from. Most game wardens wont care where you say you got them. Law is law, and unless you happen to have a brother,cousin, nephew or best friend who's the investigating officer, you're likely going home with an extra piece of paper and possibly a bit less hind end.

From the Florida Fish and Wildlife

Use of fish for bait
•Black bass, peacock bass or any part thereof may not be used as bait.
•No live nonnative fish, except variable platys and fathead minnows, may be transported to or between waters for use as bait. Live goldfish and carp may not be used as bait.
•Whole pickerel or panfish (e.g., bluegill, redear sunfish, redbreast sunfish, spotted sunfish, flier, warmouth) or parts thereof may be used as bait for sportfishing by the angler who caught them. Whole pickerel or bream or parts thereof may not be used as bait for trotlines or bush hooks or any method other than by rod and reel or pole and line.
•Panfish less than 4 inches in total length raised by a licensed aquaculture facility may be purchased and used for bait.

Those Florida fishing laws are pretty restrictive compared to ours. We can use goldfish, carp, live sunfish, anything except bass, crappie, or trout, for bait.

im in mississippi i use to be in Florida should have updated my location

game wardens r pretty cool here.

lol at 13 i pissed off a game warden i had just bought a castnet and i caught a bunch of baby crappie shad bluegill and baby catfish and i just threw them on the ground by the spillway he came up n said "i didnt see you do it so i cant prove you did it" lol the fish were still flopping around too i was to afraid to grab the baby catfish cause of there fins.

but they dont care for keeping small fish in nets people do it daily really theres so many dinks in the walls of the spillway that they even tell us to kill gar and bowfin when we catch them

I talked to relative who does a lot of river fishing on the White River by De Valls Bluff about flatheads. He said that he hasn't seen any decline in their numbers. He said that you have to fish for them a little different. Kinda like pattern a deer.

yeah i get that but still there is no way that there is as many flatheads as blues and channels in waters that contain both the fact i can go and catch 20 channels and blues in 5 hours u r lucky t catch 3 flatheads even when targeting them 100% i guess nature made it happen that way cause of how much they eat but sucks i keep going o my creek setting out pane poles and i keep catching channels n blues n bowfin dying for a flathead

Oh I think you are right that there just are not as many flatheads to begin with. I guess that is why it is so much better when you catch one.

i guess because if there were as many flats as blues n channels then theyd all b eaten and wede have no fish thats why i wont ever kill a Flathead over 10 pounds cause they need t lay those eggs n hopes of growing more i wish they would protect there fry longer some fish swallow there babies until a certain age then release them i heard if a catfish lays 20,000 eggs maybe 6 will survive in creeks rivers