The last few weeks of August the cats just disappeared from upstream on the St Croix. It happens about this time every year and I always struggle to find them. I usually shift gears and head downstream and start looking for cats by trolling the BIG water south of Stillwater. Trolling allows you to cover a lot of water and to hunt for cats instead of wait for them to find you. Trouble is – trolling gets to be a lot of work compared to anchoring up and tossing out some bait. You’ve got to handle boat control, spreading out several rods and dealing with snags, tangles, cutting bait, tending rods, etc. I managed to talk FisherDave into meeting me at the Marina and help me chase some cats. I didn’t have to twist his arm very hard – we met up right after sunup about 0700 at the Marina.
I had received some fishing reports that the shad were back and plentiful down by Bayport. Dave and I made the short run south of the Stillwater bridge and it didn’t take long to find shad. Some pretty good sized pods were hanging on that first breakline into about 24′ of water. We set up a nice spread of 4 rods off the back of the boat with fresh cut bait and trolled into a warm south wind. We had hooks in at 0745 and Dave boated the first channel cat (a fat 29″ channel cat) at 0805. He killed the Skunk right away and then we had a ball. We got a total of 5 channel cats and 1 nice flathead and we headed back upstream at 1125, just as the BIG boats started to show up.
The channel cats were all fat with Dave putting a beautiful 34″ X 21″ in the boat. That was a sweet looking channel cat. He also boated a nice 36 1/2″ X 22″ flathead that picked up a hunk of cut bait and then just swam along with the boat for quite a ways before he realized he was caught.
It was a perfect, HOT morning but the best thing about it was that it killed a long string of skunks for me. I’ll be back at them again in the next few days. Find the Shad and Find the Cats.
