Channel Cat Length vs Weight

Here is a chart I made from 163 Red River Channel Cats I measured a few years ago.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing with the rest of us.

I only dream of channel cats in the twenties
I guess for practice a guy can tie his line to a 1 ton 4×4 and try reeling it in
Cool chart and nice cats

This might be easier to read.

nice graph… did you run a linear regression to determine the relationship between length and weight? While your data is limited to the particular length range you used, the slope may still be applicable above or below that range, at least for estimation purposes.

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nice graph… did you run a linear regression to determine the relationship between length and weight? While your data is limited to the particular length range you used, the slope may still be applicable above or below that range, at least for estimation purposes.

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That’d be cool. It does look fairly linear.

hows this?

Very cool. I thought the channels up there were bigger. 27 is your biggest?

This chart was only for one week in June of 2001, I think.

26 pounds 2 ounces was the biggest for that trip.

My biggest ever was 28 pounds 2 ounces.

The biggest in our boat ever was 29 pounds 5 ounces.

Those are very accurate weights, no net, no fudging. All digital scales.

26 pounds is a big channel….30s are very rare. I’ve never seen one in the thousands that have been in the boat.

I think a lot of people round their 25 and 26 pounders up to 30 when they tell the stories.

That’s a lot of fish for one week! That must have been fun. I watched a show a year or 2 ago on Red River cats and they were catching 20#s, but said you could expect to wait an hour or 2 between fish!

Heck Id wait for a few days for one that big!

Still an awesome string of channels. I have heard rumors of the fishery up there being very very good. I got on a pattern down here on the Madison Chain. I get one over 20 each time I go Last year 22 was the biggest. I lost a few that seemed bigger. I am going to see about doing one of these graphs this year. My fish are all digital scale weighed and released. Yours are skinnier being river fish. The lake ones get shoulders like lake walleyes do not fighting the current.

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hows this?

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nice… would be better with the equation shown on the graph… (I think if you double-click on the regression line, a window pops up and a there’s a checkbox to ‘display equation’ or something like that…)

What the? You mean I have to start bringing a calculator with me when I go fishing?

Slide rule and Abacas should be fine

Got it:

Weight = 1.2975(Length) – 26.329

very interesting, thanks.

I would like to see a chart that included girths. It’s neat to see that a 30″ fish can weigh anywhere from 10-20lbs roughly.

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very interesting, thanks.

I would like to see a chart that included girths. It’s neat to see that a 30″ fish can weigh anywhere from 10-20lbs roughly.

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Interesting proposal… RB: if you have girth data, you could add that to a “z” axis and do a 3-dimensional regression. Thus, you would generate a weight estimate based on both length and girth!

Or… you could just bring a scale with you fishing and measure the weight

I don’t have any girth data.

We tried not to mess around the the fish too much before getting them back in the water.

We don’t even weigh them anymore unless they are over 25 pounds.

I’m sure there are enough of us with scales and tape measures that we could put together a bunch of data over the season, and get a fairly accurate chart put together. Provided we actually catch some fish, that is…

Ben

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I’m sure there are enough of us with scales and tape measures that we could put together a bunch of data over the season, and get a fairly accurate chart put together. Provided we actually catch some fish, that is…

Ben

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Sounds like fun, especially for a ‘numbers geek’ like me… This season, I think I’ll measure lenght, girth, and weight on the fish I catch, regardless of species and log that by date and body of water. Just a few more columns of data to put into my log/spreadsheet (I already track weather patterns, barometric pressure, and lunar phase along with fish caught!).

I know, I already admitted to being a numbers geek…

I’ll do the same. The more samples we take, the better the accuracy. So excel might actually have an application in fishing? That’s cool and scary at the same time.

Ben

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Very cool. I thought the channels up there were bigger. 27 is your biggest?

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I just searched my computer and I found weights on 421 consecutive channels from below the Lockport dam.

The average for the 421 fish was 17.5 pounds.