Question ?

[Fessum]

ok... I have a question,last night I went fishing at a local lake, while loading the boat there were two teen-age boys fishing the loading ramp. They were catching very small catfish, in the 6 to 10 inch range. they said they had been catching them for two days. i went back early this morning and I caught 30 ! They were all schooled together though....kinda in a ball...It looked to be more than a hundred....there were two schools.....I'm about to go back....when it cools a little. I'm using them to stock a pond...My question is ?
Has anyone every seen this....and what is it there doing...Something else...even when boats are loading they never scatter...just move 10 feet or so...i saw the young guys last night, fish over the top of a boat and drag a little cat thru it.. they aren't scared at all.

[father of 4]

Well I will tell you one thing. When I was 15 We used to fish off of the boat ramp at Harvey Creek on Sam Rayburn. Boy the catfish were byting like crazy. One day me and my buddy were swimming on that boat ramp and decided to swim down it to try and find lures and hooks we had lost so many of. Well we found what we were hanging on. It was a car. Had a dead guy in it. When they pulled that car out, the catfishing stunk after that. Kind of made me think what the catfish had been eating on before I ate them.

[Speck]

A friend of mine and I were fishing a private pond when we were young. We fished this pond all of the time with limited success. One day while fishing, we noticed catfish fins breaking the water on one end of the pond so we fished over to them. We caught cats every cast for about an hour before they shut off. They all were in the 2 to 3 pound range.

[roh1961]

ok... I have a question,last night I went fishing at a local lake, while loading the boat there were two teen-age boys fishing the loading ramp. They were catching very small catfish, in the 6 to 10 inch range. they said they had been catching them for two days. i went back early this morning and I caught 30 ! They were all schooled together though....kinda in a ball...It looked to be more than a hundred....there were two schools.....I'm about to go back....when it cools a little. I'm using them to stock a pond...My question is ?
Has anyone every seen this....and what is it there doing...Something else...even when boats are loading they never scatter...just move 10 feet or so...i saw the young guys last night, fish over the top of a boat and drag a little cat thru it.. they aren't scared at all.

Unless I'm wrong, and I have been wrong before, the only catfish that ball up when they are small are bullhead, aka polliwogs, chugheads. They have a bad flavor unless you harvest them from running water. They will take a pond over and about the only way to get rid of them is to add a large flathead catfish or two to the pond. We used a shotgun to shoot the balls of tiny chughead hatchlings at the top of the water to try to thin them out. I have a friend that raises catfish and he said channel cats don't do that.

[Fessum]

Because these cats are small it's hard for me to tell...I could be wrong but they looked like channel cats....white on the belly and kinda light blueish grey.....there not yellow or a real dark color. i'll try to take a good picture...and get one of ya'lls opinion... Oh...a should have said they didn't appear to have the specks on the side like some channel cats....the were pretty though..lol

[beenfishin?]

channel cats do school up. so do blue cats but not as many. If they didn't you wouldn't be able to catch more than a couple from one spot. Could be somebody dumping fish scraps at the landing keeps them there.

[roh1961]

See if you can identify them before you stock your pond. They might be channels or blues.
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwate...s/inland.phtml

[Speck]

Those I mentioned before were channel cats.

[Jerry Blake]

As was already mentioned they may be staying by the boat ramp because folks dump their fish remains there. It's also possible that someone is "baiting" the area with fish food, dog food or some type of soured grain. That will bring them in and keep them coming back if the area is baited regularly. Apparently someone is baiting close to a couple of the brushpiles we fish for crappie with soured grain because we've been catching a few catfish while crappie fishing and their bellies are full of grain and sometimes quite a bit of gas.

[crappiefarmer]

Fish guts, folks dumping minnow buckets out at the ramp, feeding chum, a dead ox, could be any of these. Years ago we had hogs on the farm and had a fenced in area in the Sound where I grew up. You could catch loads of cats and some of the biggest white perch you ever saw from that area. Dang if I would eat them though. Ain't but one thing they was eating on and it won't crappie nibbles!:D CF