I keep trying to find ways to understand the fish. I’ve been to spillways where people hook them up at one spot but my local one is a straight tube lined with large rocks. I have sat there and studied it and decided there’s a spot every 10 feet where a fish could tuck his nose down and wait. Almost any rock as big as a basketball will do. Their body is made to draft like a race car. I think of the rocks as micro structure. They’re all spread out so there’s no pattern. A few flats get caught every spring, usually by accident. Yet I know some are there, the catfish rescue on the news last summer was from the same place. They closed the road and it flooded right at prime time last June.
I think one microstructure that we can’t see from above is beaver holes. I’m sure there are others but who knows what they would be. If you could see them, a piece of culvert, a tire, a log that sits just so or whatever, you’d fish there but we don’t even know they exist. People used to line the river banks with old cars. There’s junk in there! I’ve got some madtoms in a tank and they’re really old. I think going on three years. Ever since first going in the tank they wanted to be under something. Desperately. Tails churning until they are under something. They’ll sit upside down or sideways bottom or top but they like to have a roof. And they feed in a frenzy like they’re the big dogs on the block. They act completely blind until they smell the food then they attack. Some times the weather is just right and they’ll swim around. So, that’s a long, loosely relative story but they’re sort of catfish and I’ll bet there’s something good in a good spot but you just can’t see it. Some places are obvious and hold no fish. I seem to find a lot of those.
