7/21: Change of Plans

Monday Jake, Amanda, and I decided to head out and drift the Ohio River for catfish. The plan was to launch out of a small tributary and drift pieces of cut shad down stream to a series of barge tie offs. (Large pillars in the water that the shipping containers of barges are tied off to when they aren't being used.) These pillars collect drifting debris, create scour holes, and create current breaks all of which are perfect spots for catfish to call home. We got on the water at around noon and began dropping baits behind our kayaks. We then drifted with the current and watched our rods for bites. While we were drifting along I payed close attention to my fish finder in case we came across a school of fish. I marked a fish every 80 or 90 yards, but nothing that really got me excited. I started noticing large marks suspended 10 feet deep in 30 feet of water. The arches didn't appear to be catfish, instead they were really long and thin arches. A hundred yards down the bank I soon discovered what I believed to be the cause of the weak returns on the fish finder.....gar. 

We drifted for nearly 2 hours before we got our first bite. As I was drifting around a rip rap bend I noticed a fish sitting very close to bottom on my fish finder. Less than a minute later one of my rods began to bend and then all of a sudden my drag slipped. I grabbed the rod and began playing the fish. It had some size to it, but it was far from a giant. For the first few seconds I merely pulled my kayak over to the fish, after that the fish started to roll back and forth. (Typical catfish behavior) Eventually I started pulling the fish up off of the bottom. I'd reel down and then lift my rod, reel down and then lift my rod, etc. The whole time I was fighting the fish I was still drifting with the current so my other rod was still bumping along bottom. At some point it had gotten hung up and it began to bend, and my kayak began to swing outward. Now one rod was snagged, the other had a catfish pulling on it, and the river was trying to push my kayak further down stream. I leaned over to my other rod and loosened the drag so that my kayak would slowly drift down the river while I fought my fish. As soon as I loosened the drag on my second rod, the line on the rod in my hand went slack. The fish was gone.

We continued to float downstream through the pillars that the barges use to tie off their containers, but we failed to get another bite. Once I got to the power plant we noticed a barge moving large containers around so I decided to sit in a pool of slack water in between pillars and wait for Jake and Amanda to catch up. As I was floating around in this slack water I noticed a gar breach the surface for air.  He gulped air and then quickly dove back down out of site. Less than sixty seconds later another gar breached the surface. At this point I decided to toss out a small shad on a float and see if I could temp the gar into biting. On my first cast a gar pulled my float under water within seconds.
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Now in the past I had targeted gar with hooks and cutbait and discovered that you had to let the gar run with the cutbait for a long time so that they could work the bait further down their mouth/throat. Now since I don't want to harm the fish I decided to use a circle hook so that the hook would slip out of the gars throat and into the corner of their mouth.
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As my float slipped under I disengaged the reel and let the fish take all of the line it wanted. After about 60 seconds my line stopped...... now this is where the fish typically tries to swallow your bait, once your line starts moving again then you can apply pressure/set the hook. After about sixty seconds I discovered my float sitting on top of the water 60 yards away....the gar had gotten away with my shad. In the next 20 minutes I had a half dozen gar take the float under and I missed every single one of them. By this point Jake and Amanda had started targeting gar as well, and they weren't having any luck hooking up either. We needed rope lures and all I had brought along with me this trip was my catfish gear. Jake quickly went through his tackle box and found two that Russ had given him about a month ago....since there were three of us and only two rope lures we had to come up with some way to make another. I then realized that I had an anchor in one of the boxes on my kayak trailer, the anchor line is the exact rope that we used to create the rope lures. I gave Jake and Amanda two options, (1) we continue fishing for cats in the river or (2) we head back to the boat ramp and grab the anchor cord and make a few rope lures. They chose the second option.

At 4:30pm we made it back to the boat ramp and I quickly ran up to the car and grabbed the anchor line from one of the boxes on my trailer. I had also discovered an old rope lure that had fallen through my milk crate at one point. With three rope lures and nearly 100 yards of anchor line we hit the water. Amanda was the first to get on the board with a small gar, only 20 yards from the boat ramp. It wasn't very big, maybe 18", but she was glad to have caught her first fish of the trip. She paddled up to me and I quickly untangled the gar and set it free...at that point I told her that she was going to have to start taking her own off or that she'd have to fish for something else. (She had taken her own off in the past so I know she was capable of doing it....she just didn't want to.) At first she said she was just going to quit fishing.....2 minutes later she spotted a 4 footer and changed her mind. We floated along and started picking up gar in the 25-35" range. They weren't anything worth bragging about but we were having a blast catching them. Every now and then Amanda would spot a true giant, 45+", since she could easily stand in her kayak she was always the first to see them and the first to cast at them. I bet she had 4 over 40" bite her lure and get off. On one occasion she spotted one in front of my kayak and it was a true giant. She was 50 feet or better away and I was only 15 feet away so without hesitation I casted to it. (Boy was she mad.) The gar heard the rope lure hit the water and he immediately engulfed it. I let him wrap himself up a few times and then I engaged the reel and started applying pressure. At that point he decided he was going to give my drag a proper work out. Now Amanda is really fuming, she even says, "I hope you lose it...that was my fish." Sure enough 15 seconds later my rope lure pops out. (I think that a tight drag and rope lures may be a bad combination....it may pull the lure free. Just a thought)

In less than an hour and a half I landed 6 gar over 25" and 2 under 25" so I wasn't too upset that I had lost that gar. I went back to fishing and about 20 minutes later I tucked up under an overhanging tree to find 2 small gar sitting near the bank. I decided to pass them and look for a bigger fish, I go to take a paddle stroke and I saw a gar rising toward the surface to gulp air. It was another good gar, not quite as big as the one I had just lost but it was definitely over 40". I put the rope lure about 3 feet off of the bank and drug it right over his nose and he slapped at it. He actually missed the lure but had bitten over my line so I pulled the lure into his mouth and let him start thrashing. Thee minutes later I had won the battle and it was now time for the fun part.

The Hawg Trough just wasn't long enough so we broke out a tape measure that I had found in the Walmart fabric isle and stretched it out over the gar. It went just over 44", the gar wasn't perfectly straight so 44.5 or 45" would be a safe guess. We continued to work the banks but once the sun fell over the trees the gar seemed to spread out. At 8pm we decided to head back for the evening. In the end we turned a rather slow catfishing trip into a fairly productive gar trip.