Blue Catfish Setups andRigs You Won’t Believe

“From spring into summer, once the water temperature reaches the low 80ºF range, blues move progressively deeper. In summer, I start by fishing the mid-20-foot depth range to find fish, moving deeper if I need to, following structural contours. In fall when water temperatures cool, blues start to move shallower, with 52ºF typically signaling their movement to shallow flats. After spending a period shallow, they go to deeper water as water cools into winter, eventually to 40 or 50 feet.”

Surface Surprise

“When I started fishing for catfish on Santee, I trolled the basic board setup,” Ormseth says. “When I was trolling I saw that blues were actually hitting the planer boards that cut across the surface, so I devised a surface presentation to catch blues on top.” He caught his biggest blue on this surface rig in early December.

The blue cats hitting his boards were most likely keying on shad or other baitfish, with the boards mimicking a baitfish skirting the surface plane. “For surface-fishing to be effective, baitfish have to be suspending,” he says. “There are several baitfish species in Santee—like herring, mullet, and shad. The best conditions for surface-fishing are when the water’s flat calm.”

Ormseth works surface rigs behind boards and Herbies when blues are shallower in spring and fall. He only surface-fishes at night, mostly over areas 10 feet deep or less. Among his favorite spots are where shallow channels dump into big flats, often where blues chase schools of bait. Trolling covers a lot of territory, he says, giving you the ability to fish big areas to find the blue cats.

Surface-fishing’s done using the same board and Herbie setups, except he typically fishes three rods—two board rods off each side and one rod with a Herbie float. He only runs about 1 to 2 feet of line between a board (or Herbie float) and a surface rig, compared to 100 feet with his bottom-rig setup. After clipping on the board or float, he lets out about 250 feet of line, engages the reels, and sets them in rod holders.

His surface hardware is nothing like we’ve seen before. To a barrel swivel attached to a heavy cross-lock snap, Ormseth crimps on a length of 100-pound mono followed by a bead and then a buzzbait blade, then more beads, a crimping sleeve for a spacer, a bead, a second buzzbait blade, and a couple more beads. Then he slides on a 9- or 10-inch pole float, another crimping sleeve and bead, a third buzzbait blade, and a couple more beads. Finally, a crimping sleeve attaches the line at the cross-lock snap.

To the end of the noisemaker, Ormseth ties a squid teaser with a single #1 treble hook on a 2- to 3-foot long section of 40-pound Big Game monofilament, with a barrel swivel at the end for connecting to the cross-lock snap on the rig. He likes to use mullet cutbait. For hooks: “I tried circle hooks but missed about 25 percent of fish that hit. Trebles do a much better job on the surface, and circles do better on bottom rigs,” he says. He trolls surface rigs faster than bottom rigs, about 1 mph, to get the blades churning. Result: “Strikes are explosive.”

Ormseth’s tactics are unique to the catfishing world. They should be effective on other reservoirs, promising to change the way many catmen fish—at least for those, like Ormseth, who come along and try it.

Contact: Captain Marlin Ormseth, 843/825-4713, santeecoopercatfishhunter.com.