3/14: High Winds and High Water

Friday Jake and I took the kayaks out to the warm water discharge again.The river was three feet high and was predicted to rise another foot before sunset on Friday. The weather seemed to be in our favor, with a high of 53 degrees.....however, once I looked into the hour by hour forecast I discovered that we were looking at 20mph winds with gusts up to 40mph. Since my last blog I have been out there on two other occasions, and the fishing has been pretty hot.

Mike Murphy's 27" Channel Cat, March 8th

My 31" Blue Catfish, March 11th.

I had about a 30 second debate.....to go fishing or not? Bad weather hadn't stopped me before so I loaded up the kayaks and hit the water. On the way we stopped at Walmart and grabbed a few bags of large raw shrimp and tubs of chicken liver. Once I got out to the car I put the shrimp in the bottom of a 2 quart canister and then poured the chicken liver over top of the shrimp. (I typically do this the day before I go fishing to allow the shrimp time to soak up the blood of the liver, however this was a spur of the moment trip so we had no choice.) We were now ready to hit the water. We pulled into the parking lot at 9:00am and began getting our kayaks loaded up. We each tied on 3 rigs; one was a Carolina (slip) rig for bottom fishing, a float rig for drifting, and an lure for hybrid striper fishing. Jake tied on a miniature umbrella rig and I tied on a flitterbait. We drug the kayaks down to the water and developed our game plan. I was going to head upstream and seek out active fish in the current seams created by the warm water discharges. Jake was going to work slack water areas downstream. I threw the blade bait for 30 minutes before I decided to toss out a piece of shrimp. Three minutes later I was taking a picture of a 22" channel cat for our kayakwars team. I sat around for another ten minutes before I decided to pull anchor and head down stream. At this point Jake was no where to be seen, so I figured I should probably go check on him. I paddled 100 yards downstream and as I rounded the bend I saw Jake drifting along with his rod doubled over. I sat and watched him for 30 or 40 seconds while he fought the fish. I saw the fish surface a few times and  Jake tried to land it with the fish grips. After a few failed attempts to land the fish I decided to head down and give him a hand. It turns out he had a much larger fish than I had expected.

 It was a chunky 26" channel cat, his biggest cat from a kayak to date. Whats interesting is how he said he caught it....he said he was drifting a float 3 feet deep right off of the bank with a piece of liver. At that point I made the switch to a float and worked the opposite bank. Jake had found the pattern for the day, we started catching channel cats left and right. My best guess is that during times of high water the fish vacate the deep portions of the creek which now become swift and move up into the shallow slack water created by the flooding. (Just a guess though) We drifted floats along the banks for nearly 3/4 of a mile of creek before we ran into heavy wind.

The wind was blowing directly up the creek, against the current. This was making it very hard to paddle along with our drifting floats. The profile of the float was small enough to continue drifting downstream, however the larger surface area of my body and the yak were so great that the wind was actually pushing me back against the current. I eventually fell back into old strategies, anchoring on the bank near fallen wood. This time around instead of working the deeper sections of wood I targeted the wood near the bank. We didn't catch fish near as often with this technique but the fish did seem to be a lot larger on average. Here's a shot of my largest fish of the day.....a 26.25" channel cat.

We worked the entire stretch of creek, fighting the wind the entire day. We eventually got to the mouth of the creek and set up on the upstream side of the wing dams. Jake had taken the good side, and quickly landed 2 channel cats over 18" for his kayakwar team. Luckily I caught one channel cat off of my side, I say luckily because he hit the rod that was in my rod holder so hard that he hooked himself. The wind was awful, when we casted we had to intentionally cast 10 yards into the wind in order for our baits to land where we wanted. (Close to the wing dams) The wind was then sweeping our lines against the current and pulling our baits out of position and into snags. Here's a shot of the wind and waves, note the bend in the tree tops and the waves crashing over the wing dams.

Eventually we decided to head back upstream and find some shallow wood that wasn't facing 30 mile per hour winds. We sat around for the next two hours working shallow wood on anchor. I caught an additional 3 kayakwar worthy channel cats before the sunset, giving me a grand total of 9 channel cats over 18" for the trip. (90 points) All in all I'd say we had a pretty good day given the conditions. If Jake hadn't figured the fish out so early the trip would have been much different.