In the Hot Summer, You'll Find Cats on the Rocks

 

It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do catfishermen.

In June, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted.

One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was.

I say “live bait”, and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they call “market shrimp” down in “Looseyanna”. My dad got me started using that when I was a boy in California. It’s relatively cheap to buy; comes pre-packaged in a nice little square box; and gets smellier the longer you leave it out in the sun. When you’re done, you put the unused portion in its neat little box right back in the refrigerator freezer, and don’t mention it when the screaming starts later. Go fishing.

But I like to gather worms: digging, rock and board flipping, and prowling the yard at night with a flashlight after a rain, all things I first did with dad back on the Chesapeake in Maryland.

I’ve got crawdad traps scattered about the country, ponds, creeks, lakes; not a better catfish bait ever created by God. Easy to store in a five gallon bucket with just a little (not too much) water and a tow sack stuffed down in the bottom which the craws love to muscle under. Keep the sack watered, and those ‘dads will live for days, ready to go fishing whenever you are. Just pick up the bucket by its handle and leave whenever people in the house get on your nerves.

You might want to throw a chicken neck in the bucket every now and then, the same thing you want to bait your traps with. Crawdads are meat eaters; so are catfish. So am I.

Any rocky shoreline up on Lake Keystone is my preferred location because it’s so close. Sometimes I drift the rocky bluff in front of my house in a float tube out here on Baker’s Branch. The biggest one I’ve ever caught right here was a seventeen-pound flathead, on a crawdad.

Most of the time I fish from my boat, a “small” aluminum runabout, drifting with the wind, correcting the drift with my trolling motor (now in the shop) either in the rocks opposite Pier 51 Marina, or the Highway 51 riprap at the east end of Mannford, both because of the closeness to my house.

I like to fish my bait under a fairly large (dealer’s choice here) bobber with a size four bait hook underneath; a split shot under the bobber to get the bait straight down quicker. There aren’t catfish under every rock, so you want to keep moving. Adjust the line depth with the bobber to keep the bait just above the rocks; no hang-ups. At this time of the year, well into July, keep moving and you’re eventually going to get into some fish.

I caught four nice ones two days ago after our latest shower, got broken off, and then went to the house, it being about ten o’clock, quitting time for an old catfisherman in the hot, hot summertime. I knew where lived the iced tea jug.

The roofers, and concrete layers, were just getting “warmed up.” I was glad I was not in that business. This country is too hot for old men.

Better it is to gather crawdads and catfish out there in the rocks in the cool of the day, then go home, find a glass of iced tea, sit on the porch and complain about the heat in Oklahoma, the chosen home of your grandfathers.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen