Suspended Blue Catfish

For decades, anglers fishing a variety of waterways across the nation have caught untold numbers of suspended blue catfish on trotlines and juglines. Since the 1990s, chummers and punchbait aficionados in the Heartland have tangled with numbers of suspended blues on rod and reel. At lakes such as Santee-Cooper in South Carolina, and Texoma, bordering Oklahoma and Texas, anglers occasionally catch blue cats suspended around aggregations of striped bass.

In 2006, John Jamison of Spring Hill, Kansas, and Jeremy Leach of Madison, Indiana, discovered ways to locate and allure suspended blues at several tournaments on the Ohio River. Despite these catches, they contend that knowledge about suspended blue catfish remains rudimentary and suggest it’s high time for anglers and biologists to commence some cutting-edge explorations into this phenomenon.

Gary Dollahon of Tulsa, Oklahoma, wasn’t aware of Jamison and Leach’s work, but during the winter of 2008 and 2009, he found a mother lode of suspended blues, spending many hours catching them and examining their ways with his sonar devices and Aqua-Vu underwater camera.

Unlike Jamison and Leach, Dollahon isn’t a diehard catman. Instead, he’s a consummate multispecies angler. One of the virtues of multispecies angling is that it can reveal piscatorial bonanzas that elude single-species anglers. In that spirit, Dollahon uncovered his blue-catfish treasure-trove while pursuing freshwater drum with a 3/4-ounce white jigging spoon in 55 to 80 feet of water in the lower portions of Tenkiller Lake, Oklahoma. Because wintertime fishing for many species can be problematic in northeastern Oklahoma, he finds the freshwater drum a gamy and plentiful fish on which to hone deep-water fishing skills and equipment.

In winters past, Dollahon inadvertently caught suspended blues on a spoon, using a vertical presentation while fishing for drum and white bass around massive schools of threadfin shad. He noticed that as the water cooled from the high-40°F range in early December into the 30s in late January, the suspended drum and white bass gradually moved from depths of 55 to 82 feet;  the depth range of the shad also expanded. As the water cooled, drum and white bass milled about along the bottom rather than in the water column, and when this occurred, Dollahon rarely caught a blue catfish. But once he changed his tactics during the winter of 2008 and 2009, his catches of blue cats increased exponentially. It began when Gary and his son, B.J., ventured to Tenkiller on December 26, 2008.

Road to Discovery

During their outing to Tenkiller the water temperature registered 48°F, unseasonably warm. The depth of the water in the area they plied ranged from 75 to 133 feet. Some spots had massive schools of threadfin shad, several the size of a football field. Some of these schools were 50 feet thick, extending from depths of 70 to 120 feet. Others ranged from 50 to 100 feet deep. At times, shad skimmed near the surface, attracting the attention of gulls, pelicans, and loons. Not all of the shad schools were gigantic, but when they were situated in 55 to 65 feet, the Dollahons regularly tangled with drum at a rapid pace.

As they caught drum from in and underneath the shad schools, they noticed on sonar noteworthy groups of big fish about 5 to 15 feet above the big shad schools beginning at depths of around 50 to 55 feet. The Dollahons were somewhat puzzled, noting that it’s uncharacteristic of drum to suspend above shad schools. Nevertheless, they suspected that the fish were big drum and that they were on the threshold of unlocking another approach to catching wintertime drum.

It wasn’t until they vertically presented a 3/4-ounce jigging spoon and a tandem rig of a 1/8-ounce jighead dressed with a Bobby Garland Stroll’R in a bluegrass hue in 35 to 45 feet of water that the Dollahons discovered the fish were blue catfish. In Gary’s eyes, it was an epiphany.

Refining Tactics

Throughout most of January following that trip, Dollahon worked on refining his methods for pinpointing and inveigling suspended blue catfish. During this spell, he fished with **** Faurot and James Therrell of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and me.

On Dollahon’s first outing with Faurot, they determined that the most effective tactic was vertically presenting a 3/16-ounce jighead sporting a 3.5-inch Gene Larew Long John Minnow in a pearl-and-blue pattern. They fished it on a 9-foot medium-action Quantum Todd Huckabee Series Xtralite spinning rod (XPS902M) matched with a PT10 Quantum Energy spinning reel spooled with 6-pound-test Cajun monofilament. The jig was attached to the line with a loop knot, and the jig and the gyrations of its slender paddletail replicated the nervous antics of the threadfin shad that the blue catfish preyed upon.

On January 17, Dollahon and Therrell spooled with 6-pound Cajun Optix line, a mono with two alternating colors, red and high-vis yellow to aid in determining depths and detecting strikes. Counting the segments as the line exited the rod’s top guide allows accurate tracking of lure depth without the need to place lures within the transducer cone of the sonar.

Dollahon says that 6-pound-line allows the lightweight jig and soft-plastic lure to work in the deep-water confines more efficiently than a heavier line and larger jig combo. Because the blue catfish are suspended in open water away from snags, he finds that his “crappie tactics for blue cats” to be both an exhilarating and fruitful way to fish.

The accuracy of the vertical presentation was further enhanced on January 21, when Dollahon and I marked our lines with a blue permanent ink pen immediately upon hooking a blue catfish.