I spent the winter trying to design the perfect flathead catfish fishing rig. I went to school on how some other large fish species both fresh water and salt water are fished. I looked closely at tactics and techniques used for halibut fishing and salmon fishing on the west coast. How they present live and cut bait to catch large fish. In most cases they are fishing in current or tidal areas and use that current to present their baits. Their fishing rigs have to be sturdy and capable of handling large, strong fish but also able to present a bait without getting tangled. On the west coast they will fish with wire spreaders which is basically a 3-way rig designed to hold the leader away from the dropper line. The salmon fishermen use what is called a swing spreader. The leader arm of the spreader can spin around the axis of the dropper wire. This works really nice in a strong current and keeps the rig from getting all tangled up.
I decided the challenge is to design a flathead swing spreader rig that would hold a large live bait or a large piece of cut bait just off the bottom about 4 to 6 inches. The basic rig needs to be strong enough to handle a huge fish – a 40 to 60 pound or larger fish. It also should be able to be fished vertically on a slow drift or troll ideally at about a .3 to .75 mph. The rig should also provide some sound or attraction that rings a dinner bell for a big cat. The halibut and salmon fishermen run dodgers and flashers and spin-n-glows and all kinds of attractors. Lastly the basic Flathead swing spreader needs to standup vertically when it is still fished anchored by a large sinker.
What I needed to make was a heavy-duty wire swing spreader that floats. I started looking at wire forming tools from all the major tackle suppliers. The strongest wire I could find was 0.051” wire mostly used by musky fisherman. It was hard to find a wire forming tool that was affordable that could work with that heavy of a wire. I ended up buying a Twistech Magnum Wire Forming Tool. The Twistech is a sweet tackle maker and it makes perfect swing spreaders.
The next challenge was to figure out how to float the swing spreader so it will standup and hold my bait in the 4” to 6” target zone. I figured out how to float it two different ways. One way is to just put a float on the vertical axis wire and the other way is to put a float on the swing arm wire. I have built them both ways – the best floats are those where I used a size #000 Spin-N-Glow as the float on the swing arm. Those provide some crazy wicked bait attraction.
So, stay tuned – April 1st is the Flathead Opener. I will let you know how the Flathead Standup Swing Spreader works out. It is being field tested by some of our most highly qualified IDO cat fishermen. If they can’t catch cats with it nobody can.
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