Flatheads on the Cut and Run

Mikey hates everything. You might remember this kid, rising out of a 1970s Life cereal commercial to pop-culture status. The scene is set with three brothers sitting around the breakfast table:

“Did you try it?” big brother 1 says to big brother 2 as he slides the cereal bowl to him.

“I’m not gonna try it,” says BB 2. “Did you try it?”

“I’m not gonna try it.”

“Hey, let’s ask Mikey,” suggests BB 1.

“He won’t eat it. He hates everything,” replies BB 2, passing the bowl on to little brother.

Mikey fills his spoon and chomps down in overwhelming approval.

“He likes it! Hey Mikey!”

In the fishing universe, the ratio of Mikeys to big brothers is probably somewhere around 1 in 10. Big brother is I’m-not-gonna-try-it conventional. Mikey really doesn’t hate everything; he’s just misunderstood, an explorer, an experimenter, willing to take a chance to discover new things. A success along the way might be outnumbered by failures, but it’s worth it. Isn’t it the Mikeys that keep fishing and the angling industry moving forward? When he finds there’s a better way to play the game, word gets out, and all of a sudden there’s an explosion of people doing what Mikey does, using what Mikey uses. Sometimes. There’s the occasional Mikey that comes along and there’s no explosion, just a smaller group that eventually gets it. A case in point is in this issue. Editor in Chief Doug Stange shares further refinements of his system for using swimbaits for walleyes, suggesting if used right, this lure category is perhaps the most remarkable presentation that’s come along in all his years in fishing. Stange ate the cereal, told you it’s some of the best out there, but the big brothers stick with business as usual. Sure, it’s hard to venture from conventional methods that can work well. But why settle for a straight on the deal when someone is telling you that the cards are set for a straight flush? Who’s willing to draw?

Then there’s the flathead catfish world, where there’s probably nothing more conventional than fishing with big, aggressive livebaits. Flatheads are apex predators after all, top of the chain, kings of their underwater empire. Channel cats, though, eat all sorts of things, dead or alive, meat or not. But a flathead? Now there’s an aquatic T-Rex—inclined to hunt, kill, and devour.

But then the occasional flathead comes along and eats a cutbait—no liveliness to the offering, nothing to slaughter, none of the signals that trigger a flathead’s motion-detector. These catches are easily set aside as happenstance when the target’s channel cats or blues. And most of them are, because most anglers soaking cutbaits aren’t after flatheads.

“I think back to fishing with Jim Moyer in the 1980s on the Mississippi River,” Stange recalls. “We were fishing cutbaits for blue cats, but we caught at least one flathead each day were out. Back then we were still learning about where to consistently find blues, and where we fished—in the main river close to the dropoff near cover—overlapped with flathead territory.

“That’s about when we started to make the connection, and we never saw anyone writing about flatheads on cutbait then. Toad Smith—a maestro of slipfloating cats in smaller rivers, also used to connect with a fair share of flatheads drifting cutbaits for channel cats around logjams. Still, we always targeted flatheads on livebaits, and never really suggested catching them on cutbait until after Toad passed away in 1991. But there may have been other people making the cutbait-flathead connection then.”

In 1996, two genuine Mikeys, brothers Ryan and Vaughn Wassink of Hull, Iowa, discovered something that eventually changed the way they approach flathead fishing. “It started for us on a trip to the Minnesota River. We were using cutbait for channel cats around logjams and we caught a 41-pound flathead,” says Ryan. “A few anglers like Darrell Carter were onto a similar pattern in the Sioux River, a tributary to the Missouri River in Iowa, but we continued to test cutbaits on the Minnesota, fishing bigger baits inside logjams, and we caught just as many or more flatheads than we used to. Now, it’s our primary presentation. The only times we don’t use cutbait are during the spawn—typically for the month of July—and at night.

According to Wassink, the best time to fish with cutbait is during the day, and the best spots to fish are woodpiles. Several tracking studies confirm their observations, showing that flatheads are mostly stationary in cover when the sun’s up, becoming more active at night. In one such study, Dr. Jason Vokoun, who tracked flatheads on the Grand and Cuivre rivers in Missouri, found that during 24-hour periods during the summer, flatheads held in cover for as long as 23 hours, the remainder of the time spent hopscotching between cover areas. These movements tended to occur from around sunset to midnight, and then again for a few hours before sunrise. A mysterious blip in movement also happened around noon. They were small moves, some fish just switching position in the same logjam, perhaps to stay in shade as the sun angle shifted.

“Fish are holding tight to cover,” Wassink says, “so we’re running from logjam to logjam. If we’re fishing a spot and don’t get a bite within about 5 minutes, we pull anchor and head to the next spot. An ideal logjam has some big cottonwoods plugged with logs and debris. Another key is slow current; we avoid woodpiles that have fast current flowing through them. If you’re running the river and you see an old basketball floating in the wood, it’s probably a good spot. Another clue is grass growing on the matted floating debris collected in the snag. And you don’t need to find the deepest wood-laden holes. In the Minnesota River where we fish the deepest holes are about 25 feet, but we focus on woodpiles in 8- to 16-foot holes, and rarely any shallower than 4 feet.

“White sucker is our favorite bait—the biggest we can find,” he says. “The head is absolutely the best part to fish with. And it’s important that the bait’s kept fresh. Keep suckers alive and cut them on site, or keep cut pieces in plastic bags in a cooler. Bags should be sealed tight so the bait doesn’t get soggy from sitting in meltwater at the bottom of the cooler.”

The Wassinks present cutbait on slipsinker rigs. A 3-ounce No-Roll sinker rides above the swivel, with a 12-inch leader sporting a 10/0 Gamakatsu Big River hook. They work with 40-pound Berkley Big Game, preferring the mono to a braided line when fishing around abrasive wood. “The fish tend to whack a bait once and then the rod slowly goes down.” Ryan adds: “Then you need to bear down and haul the fish away from the snag. The stretch in mono helps cushion the stress of quickly heaving back to extract the fish. If you’re using braid and the line is nicked or starting to fray, there’s a better chance of it snapping when you rear back.