Finding Big Cats in the Ohio

The following was e-mailed to me in response to my e-mailing Tim with some questions about Ohio River Cats. I had asked Tim how to locate cats on the bottom of the river using a good graph and where to look. In an effort to get the article online fast it was posted as is with no editing.

To answer your question on the Lowrance, I look for drop-offs,sharp drop offs not the long flowing kinds but the type that a tree or a car could pile up in and I found two spots last year on the Ohio that had cars in them after the flood, they were catfish magnets, I hope they are still there this year!

I fish mainly deep water 40-60ft deep and if it has a drop-off that is even better, I study maps of the Ohio River that I picked up from the Corps of Engineers, they show you where there are breaks in water depths and then I go out and try to find those areas, sometimes I never even put a pole in the water but do the scouting thing for about two or three times before I really start fishing I mark spots on the maps and the GPS, these areas don't change from year to year unless we have major flooding then everything changes, I look for scour holes and these are scattered up and down the river from the dam to Cincinnati, I don't know what the main attraction is for a scour hole but Flatheads love these areas, they are very hard to find and it just takes a lot of time on the water to find them, trolling around and keeping an eye on the finder, thats why I do the scouting thing, something my Grandfather taught me.

The old lock and dams that were removed years ago are my favorite places, some of these lay only in twenty feet of water but Flatheads use them as ambush points, tough to fish because the concrete and old structure claims a bottom rig, tried to fish along the edges but they hide down in the cracks and crevices of the old structures, working on two methods right now to fish these areas, 1) Using a bottom bouncer to probe these areas has worked but sometimes it gets hung up in a crack. 2) ballooning the shad in these areas and this looks like the more productive kind of rig, have the balloons that kids use at party's and put a loop in the line and tie a balloon around the loop and troll across the tops of the structure, big cat grabs the shad and the balloon pops off and your free to fight the fish, I'm going to really work hard with this method this year, I left 200 pounds of lead on the bottom last year fishing these structures and this year I switched to Berkley E-Cat #4 rods so I can really lean on them.

I fish in and around those things they tie barges off to, they look like water towers, some have lights on them but the ones that are productive have deep water near them, there is always a massive washout area on the back side of these structures, they cut the current and Flatheads lay behind them, I drop baits right in front of the structures and always put cutbait near my live bait.

I fish all my Tournaments during the night but I fish more during the daylight hours and I catch more fish during the daylight hours, the river is prime right now but I can't find a spot to put my boat in due to all the mud on the ramps.

When looking for catfish that are on or near the bottom and this is going to be hard to explain to ya, if I see what I think is a fish I will zoom in on it,first 2x then 4x. Look at the picture if it is a boulder the Grayline will be wide because the surface is hard and the signal bounces back fast, but if it is a Flathead it will show up as a thinline do to his body absorbing the signal and you will see like a cross hatching that shows under him if he is just off the bottom, this is hard to explain what this looks like, tomorrow I think I have a picture of this and I will see if I can find it and send to you, another thing if you run the sensitivity up so lets say that your in 30 foot of water,at the sixty foot level you will see another picture of the bottom, it is always 2x the original depth, if a Flathead is on the bottom, he will not show up at the sixty foot level !!!! I don't know why but this was another trick my Grandfather taught me using the old style Lowrance green box flasher, and the same trick works with the LCD's of today.

One other thing and I'll shut up, I look for schools of bait fish,Channels and Blues and Flatheads stay right with them and they always stop at structures to rest and the big boys tear them up when they do that.

Tim's Page: http://www.hookedoncatfish.com/