It may be cold but the channels haven’t gone to sleep yet. Sunday night tied for one of my best channel cat nights. It isn’t often I find them really concentrated in one spot. I catch one or two or four pretty often but more than that just doesn’t happen for me, especially on a lake. It’s a 5000 acre lake full of shad right now and lacks much structure.
I also took Justin out the next day and caught 4 or 5.
Have a nice winter.
What a haul
I was thinking everyone was fishing for the scaly types!
A welcome post!!
I’m not sure if I’ll be chasing them on the ice this year, more likely looking for them on P4 over the winter months.
Nice catch!
and your bait de jour was??
Nice mess Josh. If you are putting those up, try cutting off their tails when still alive or cutting the gill and let them bleed for 20 minutes. The fillets turn almost white and you can see exactly where you should trim the fat. Channel cats do stack up nicely this time of year, if you can find them it can be an exceptional outing. In rivers, the outside bends are the first place I’d try. In a lake, you already know where, but they often relate to a deeper break next to a tributary that dumps in. This is often not far from where you’d find them in spring in the water that heats the fastest in the system. The northern bay is a good place to start.
Channels and Hush Puppies Yum!
Thanks. It’s frustrating expecting success when it should be easy and then getting it when it seems unlikely. The local rivers here are all tied to a couple of reservoirs and the rivers aren’t that big. There are patterns that I can’t follow. What I really mean is I wish I could catch these things in the darned summer.
Kev is pretty much right on except he left out the part about some warm water getting dumped in and the shad being stacked up there. I wish I could find these fish in the spring after they are done sucking up all the winterkill shad.
I will try again once I get the leaky pipe in the ceiling fixed. Ugh
Also, bought a 16′ SeaArk. I hope to take a trip up North this next summer.
Ryan, I pretend to. I “fish” for them a lot but catch few. Bank poles are legal here and a number of people fish for meat here in my immediate area of the Des Moines. For instance, I feel like a hog just keeping this many but it’s perfectly legal. A guy I work with told me he had a fish fry and they cooked 50 pounds of fillets.
Anyway, we have a nice channel thing going on in the reservoir. They get quite fat, especially in the spring when they eat all the dead shad. I have not located them when they are on but I’ve read an article about it. Once they get big enough to eat live shad, the growth rate really takes off, at least that’s my theory. How far North do the shad go? They’re often thick here but last winter really winterkilled them bad.
Don’t be depressed! It’s only like 5 months until there’s more action 
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