Raccoon critters aside, I was about to make observations about the night bite for big channel cats. Typical were our early experiments on the Red River below the Lockport Dam just north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, now the most famous channel catfishery in the world. Toad Smith and I first saw this portion of the river on a June day in the early 1980s. We’d heard tales of the fishery and went to check it on our return from a trip for pike.

We walked down to the bank to a small group of people set up just below what was then Lilly Ann’s and now is catman Stu McKay’s Cats On The Red—no one else fishing. There on a stringer made of 25 feet of 1/4-inch chain were 15 of the biggest channel cats we’d ever seen. Manitoba had no limit on cats at the time, and the stringer didn’t hold a fish under 20 pounds. Nearby a sort of commercial cat-cleaning operation was in progress, with three men cleaning fish and three women canning the fish over several camp stoves.

That was sort of the beginning of the new age of catfishing on the Red in Manitoba. A few articles alerted anglers to the fishery, and the rest is history, including Manitoba’s proactive plan to protect the unique fishery, beginning about 1990, with restrictive harvest regulations.

By about 1986, having caught hundreds of 15- to 24-pound channel cats from this fishery during many day trips, Toad, Manitoba friend Ted Jowett, and I began to wonder if we weren’t missing the big fish. We resolved to spend a few August nights fishing, to check out a nocturnal bite for big cats.

We fished eddy areas below the dam, as well as the head of prominent holes up- and downriver. One night we caught 28 fish. Toad always counted. Couple small fish and 24 fish from 14 to 23 pounds. Never saw another angler after midnight. Never scratched a fish larger than we would have caught during the day. Seemed the fish never stopped feeding, no matter the time of day, until most of those holding in an area had been caught. That is, if you fished an eddy area below the dam one night, the catch would be drastically reduced the next night. Same thing for fishing the head of a major hole two nights in a row.

The fish in this portion of the Red have gotten larger over the years, but it has everything to do with harvest protection and little to do with time of day. I haven’t conducted the same sort of experiment in recent times, but today I’d expect to catch a fair number of 15- to 26-pound fish, as well as a few pushing beyond 30, especially during September—the same sort of fish you’d catch during the day.

We did, however, learn interesting things about fishing at night. The Red has a good flow (at least a consistent flow) most of the year, even when the water’s down during summer. Once you move downriver from the tailwaters, the river probably averages 150 yards from bank to bank. Some of those shorelines have a distinct lip connected to shallow flats that connect to midriver holes. So say a shoreline has a lip that drops immediately into a foot or two of water, connected to a flat that runs 3 to 8 to 11 feet deep, which then drops into a hole maybe 15 to 20 feet deep.

If Toad Smith has a legacy in catfishing, something he introduced to the sport beyond his huge personality, it is float-fishing. Toad was using floats when I first heard of him in the early 1970s. Today, drifting cutbaits below a float is popular on the Red and in a few other areas of the country, but it was entirely unheard of back then.