Summer Nights and Cool Catfish
by Dennis McKinney
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After a long evening of slow fishing had stretched into the wee hours of a new day, two cat fishermen camped on the shoreline of Nee Gronda Reservoir placed their baited rods in holders and crawled into their sleeping bags. Just before dawn, while the anglers were sleeping like logs, a ghostly blue fish with a broad head and a forked tail swam into the dark shallow water beyond the reach of a propane lantern sitting by the water.
With a full moon dropping away to the west and gentle waves lapping at the shoreline, the fish, a large, sleek-bodied catfish, swam back and forth through shallows mined with baited hooks. Cautiously, the catfish scavenged the shallows for edibles. Long sensory tentacles, called barbels, reached out from the head, scanning the area for food, testing all the prospects for authenticity, and then transmitting the data to the brain for use in making the most fundamental of decisions. Is it food or not food?
Not food … not food … not food … not food … Food!
A small copper bell attached to the tip of one of the fishing rods jingled hard as the rod arched deeply toward the running catfish. The reel’s drag stuttered and slipped, surrendering line to the large blue fish that had stripped fifty yards from the spool and was still tugging away toward the rising sun, and the safety of deep water. The bell rousted the fishermen from sleeping bags, and so began the final round in a match that began twelve hours earlier.
The night before, the fishermen had set out lawn chairs and lanterns, and had prepared for a long night of matching wits and patience with Nee Gronda’s catfish. Until the copper bell tolled at sunrise, the catfish were winning.
Catfish anglers, especially those that target big catfish, know that patience and hours of tending baited rods in the dark are necessary parts of the sport. Yet, sometimes that can be the easy part. Choosing the bait . What do you offer a fish that will eat almost anything, alive or otherwise, but scrutinizes its food with great deliberation?
The short list of catfish offerings includes worms, leeches, minnows, cut-baits, flavored dough balls, blood baits, a glut of nauseating concoctions aptly called stink baits, and the innards of all manner of barnyard and woodland creatures.
One member of the Nee Gronda night-fishing team had once landed several channel catfish at Chatfield Reservoir that weighed more than thirty pounds. So, under his recommendation, the team baited their hooks with whole night crawlers and doused them with an oily potion that smelled like industrial-strength licorice. However, unlike their Metro cousins, the Nee Gronda catfish ignored the squirming licorice-flavored worms.
Carp, it appeared, were the only fish in Nee Gronda with a taste for licorice. Throughout the evening hours and into the night, one of the rods baited with a juiced worm would jingle and the fishermen would reel in a small carp. Around midnight, a local resident and his wife drove into the catfish camp to “see what was going on”. The fishermen admitted their lack of success and their dilemma over the choice of baits.
“You just caught the best bait there is for catfish,” the local said about the small carp flopping around in the sand. “You can’t beat cut-up carp, especially for blue cats.”
The catfish that ate the carp filet at sunrise was blue, but only in color. After a bit of debate and close examination of photos (the catfish was released alive) a Division of Wildlife made a positive identification. The fish was a channel catfish, not a blue catfish.
Because of their similarity in appearance with channel catfish, identifying a blue catfish is difficult. Both species have forked tails and can appear bluish or gray in color. Positive identification is made by counting the number of spiny rays in the anal fin. Channel catfish have 24 to 29 fin rays. Blue catfish have 30 to 35. The ghostly blue sunrise catfish had 25 fin rays.
The Division of Wildlife introduced blue catfish into Nee Gronda in a single batch of 70,000 two-inch long fingerlings in August of 2002. Channel cats, however, are stocked almost every year, with more than 300,000 fingerlings over the past ten years.
Both species are capable of growing to leviathan sizes. The all-tackle world record for a blue catfish is a 111-pounder caught at Wheeler’s Reservoir, Tennessee. The world-record channel catfish is a 58 pounder from Santee-Cooper Reservoir in South Carolina.
Colorado records are 20 pounds 1 ounce for a blue cat, and 33 pounds 8 ounces for a channel cat.
Because of Colorado’s cooler water temperatures and a shortened growing season, it is unlikely that blue catfish will grow to triple-digits weights in Colorado. Nevertheless, in the shad-rich waters of Nee Gronda Reservoir, anything is possible.
Nee Gronda Reservoir is located at Queens State Wildlife Area north of Lamar. Other waters with populations of both channel and blue catfish in eastern Colorado include, Adobe Creek Reservoir (Blue Creek Lake), Nee Noshe Reservoir, and John Martin Reservoir.
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