I always have been told that bullheads, sunfish and suckers were the best bait for cats. I appears that I’ve been told wrong….according to an artical in the Arkansas Sportsman.
Well, the days went along, and the river went down between its banks again; and about the first thing we done was to bait one of the big hooks with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was as big as a man, being six foot, two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds. We couldn’t handle him, of course; he would a flung us into Illinois. We just set there and watched him rip and tear around till he drownded.”
On Aug. 3, around 6:30 p.m., Charles Ashley Jr. of Marion was catfishing with two friends on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River at West Memphis. Ashley was fishing with an inexpensive medium-weight spinning combo he had recently bought. He baited it with a chunk of Spam, cast it out, let it sink to the bottom and set the hook on a 116-pound, 12-ounce blue cat just minutes later. The next day, I certified his fish as a new Arkansas rod-and-reel record, and, just recently, it was certified as a new all-tackle world record.
My favorite big Mississippi catfish story comes from the August 1867 edition of Harper’s new monthly magazine. It is one of the most unusual cat tales ever published, about a man crossing the Mississippi in a boat rowed by some soldiers, when ” … he saw approaching them what appeared to be a large fish, bobbing up and down upon the surface of the water like a porpoise. He handed his sabre to one of the men, and told him to strike it as it passed. The soldier watched his opportunity and gave the fish a vigorous thrust, but the point glanced as if it had struck a bladder. Resolved not to let the creature escape, the man jumped into the stream, and seizing it by the gills managed, with assistance, to get it into the boat. It proved to be a large cat-fish, which had swallowed a musk-rat. The animal’s tail still hung out of its mouth.”
Steve? You still trapping them tree rats?
