It sounds like you are doing everything right, especially if you have caught cats there in the past. One thing to remember about any river is that “spots” are only as good as the current weather conditions allow (height, flow, clarity, etc). I fished a couple of spots last night that have been killer with the current conditions we have now and only got one fish at each spot, whereas in the past we’ve seen up to 20 fish in one night. I would advise not to get caught up on fishing memories, try a spot for a couple hours and move on.
Flatheads will test you mental willpower no doubt. There were many times last month that I should have just said “heck with it” and hung it up. Up until last night, I had been on a skunk streak since mid June in which I hadn’t caught a Flathead on the MN river. Now mind you I’ve been fishing 6-7 night a week for about 5 hours a night. So minus my successful trips to Pool 2 during that time frame, I figure roughly 30 nights or nearly 150 hours without a flat…..not one. I did however finally break that streak last night and looking forward to some more fish in the next couple of months, but it was a long haul to get there.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes patience is the biggest factor in catching fish, you just have to “keep on keeping on” if you want to catch Flats on a regular basis. In the meantime, when you are not catching fish, think about why you might not be catching them, what can you try differently, or things that could up your odds. Sometimes even that doesn’t even work though, but then again, sometimes it does.
You know what else is great about getting skunked day in and day out? That means you are putting in lots of time. With that time comes knowing of not only when the fish DO start to bite again, but also teaches you valuable knowledge of the river in general. For example, what the launch conditions are like, what happens when it rains 2 inches and how that changes things, where this tree or that log finally settled and created a snag, when a certain creek starts to flow heavily, when a rock bar becomes exposed, etc. All of these add up to a knowledge base of finding fish. And the ONLY way you will truly learn this stuff is time on the water. You can’t learn this stuff on the interwebz, and most likely if you try to, you will just be mislead anyways by people trying to protect their “spots” or being jokesters. Trust very little of what you read in public fishing forums. I guess that kind of discredits this whole post, but hopefully you get the drift.
Like you, I could easily say I’ve had a poor year with all those fishless nights, but according to my log, we are approaching the century mark for flats and personally I have a couple over 40 and one over 50, so in retrospect it has been a GREAT year and I’ll just chalk up July as my sacrifice to the fish Gods.
Good Luck!
