The weather outlook was looking good for the night. The flow has picked up due to the recent rains up North.
Everything was looking good for the evening.
My guests tonight were Paul Alert of Tucson, AZ and his buddy Ron Kahler of Boone, IA. It was their first trip up to Pool 4 and Everts Fishing Resort.
Our goal of course was to get into some Trophy Flatheads.
On the way to our first stop, I thought it was pretty quiet on the river for a Saturday night. We spotted two boats out catten. We pasted Mark Johnson and friend in one area and Chris Tuckner in another.
Once anchored, we were going through the steps of what happens once we hook into a good fish. It doesn’t really matter what happens when a small fish is caught, but having a game plan in case Mr. Big comes visiting is imperative to keeping the odds in our favor for landing it. I’m glad we went through this last night.
Just after dark the line out alarm signals the first chance at a flatty for the night. Disappointment sets in as the fish is lost right below the boat. Not to worry, the night is young.
Second location…line line out alarm goes off, hook set, hook drops out. Dang! Now I have to make the decision, do we move on or do we wait them out? The question every cat fisherman gets use to asking themselves. It’s a very good spot, but I elect to move on.
The next fishing area has more flow than the other areas we’ve fished. I had high hopes to pick up at least two good ones here, with just making short moves to pick them up.
I cast the first bullie out and grab the second rod and WHAM! First run in less than two minutes of the bullhead hitting the water! Who HOOO! …then the PowerPro just stopped going out the the reel. Turns out the fish went into some wood laying on the bottom and I’ll guess the line, swivel or sinker gave too much resistance the the bully was either pull out of the cats mouth or he just dropped in. Either way. Another run with out a glimpse of the fish! 
Paul and Ron didn’t do anything wrong…it just didn’t happen for them on those three. They know fishing, sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
It’s around 1 am now. Not a fish in the boat. I kept saying to myself “this guy is from AZ, I have to send him off with a photo that he will be proud of”. I kidded them about seeing the sun come up on the ol’ ‘sippi.
Headed to our last area. This time I put a rod out with a chunk of cut sucker on. I though I might get lucky and hook into a channel. And that’s exactly what happened. The first and only channel came in and pulled the scale to 3 pounds. Not exactly a trophy.
Since there’s “a” channel biting, I changed up the rods to three with circle hooks and cut sucker and one with a bully. It’s close to three in the morning as we watched the rods…and I was running out of stories!
Rod was in the “batter’s box” meaning he would be the one to catch the next fish. We talked about how circle hooks worked and I repeated a number of times “it’s important not to set the hook”, which is so natural to do.
While I wasn’t looking the cut bait rod next to Ron started bouncing…and it was finally fish ON! with a somewhat larger fish. Ron landed his first Lake Sturgeon. Certainly not a trophy at 32 inches…but hey, beggars can’t be choosers!
