Sandman, the reason I asked is that I have seen a small local public lake where there are good numbers of yellow cat or opelousas cat and blue catfish, LMB of all sizes were heavily preyed upon every year and we would catch mostly small LMB in the 6-8" size range, most of LMB never did live to get much bigger than that. I was thinking maybe some big flatheads were present and eating most of your bigger LMB. Your mudcat sounds like some type of bullhead which shouldn't be part of the problem.
