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.

Dollahon begins each outing by slowly and deliberately maneuvering his boat, crisscrossing large expanses of deep water. His eyes are affixed to his sonar while he searches for the ideal combination of suspended shad and blue catfish. Sometimes he spends 30 minutes or more looking for the ideal scenario. Like the proverbial search for the needle in a haystack, it tests an angler’s observation skills and abilities to relish the thrill of monotony.

At times he settles for a less-than-ideal aggregation of shad and blue cats, meaning that the shad are too deep and blues too scattered. But even at some of the inferior scenarios and locales, he and his co-anglers occasionally tangle with a catfish or two.

Examining the behaviors of several schools of shad and blue catfish with an Aqua-Vu camera reveals that these species can move constantly and haphazardly, and even a gigantic concentration of shad and blue catfish rarely remains at the same place for more than 10 minutes. Throughout the day as the aggregations of shad and blue catfish continually move, Dollahon makes extensive searches with his sonar to relocate a school, or to find another school of shad and blue catfish. He uses either his outboard or his bow-mounted MotorGuide variable-speed trolling motor with built-in transducer to search.

On our January 21st trip the water temperature registered 43°F and Dollahon examined three different locales: halfway inside a large secondary creek arm; the mouth of a main-lake cove; and, a massive and complex underwater environment that was adjacent to the main river channel near the dam. The only fruitful area was the one in the vicinity of the dam.

Once he located a pack of blue catfish in 40 feet of water with a bevy of threadfin shad below, he positioned his boat directly above them and used his trolling motor to slowly maneuver around the edges of the fish, as well as cutting figure-8s across the entire mass of fish.

At times, Dollahon finds it best to keep the boat motionless and floating directly above the core of the schools of shad and blue catfish—an easier task to accomplish on a windless day. Windless conditions also facilitate a more precise presentation of a jig, as well as make it easier to detect subtle and tentative strikes.

When his boat was correctly positioned, he dropped the jig vertically into 40 feet of water. Then he executed a variety of presentations to identify the one that elicited the most strikes. He also experimented with various depths, ranging from 35 to 55 feet. At times, his jig plummeted into 65 and 70 feet of water, where he failed to get a strike from a blue catfish. Most of the strikes were at depths of 35 to 45 feet over lake depths of 130 feet.

Presentation Palette

As Dollahon holds his rod parallel to the lake’s surface, he slowly moves it about 4 feet to the left, stopping it and allowing the jig to swing. Once the jig is directly under the rod tip, he moves it 4 feet to the right and allows it to swing again.

Occasionally he lifts the jig several feet by slowly raising and then dropping the rod, allowing the jig to fall on a semi-slack line. Sometimes he enhances the rise and fall by shaking his rod. He also experiments with different intensities of shakes. At times, he shakes it only during the fall. During some of the lifts and drops, he creates a laddering sequence, pausing the lift and drop about every 8 inches.

As he slowly moves his boat with the trolling motor around and across the suspended fish, he works into the wind, employing a stop-and-go strolling motif with an eye on keeping his jig as vertical as possible. When he stops the trolling motor, the jig begins to slowly swing toward his rod tip, and when he starts the trolling motor, the jig strolls away from the rod tip.

During these strolling spells, he sometimes shakes his rod, but most of the time he holds it motionless and parallel to the surface. These short strolls and swings of the jig occasionally provoked a blue catfish to attack the presentation. But, he says that the catfish often prefer a deadstick presentation of his jig and Long John Minnow.

There are outings when all of his presentations catch cats, and there are days when only one or two of them bewitches his quarry. He says that the cornerstone to a successful trip revolves around testing all of the presentations in his repertoire, as well as occasionally adding a few quirky flashes, gyrations, and undulations in hopes of attracting the eye of a nearby blue cat.

Most of the blues that Dollahon and his co-anglers catch weigh from 4 to 6 pounds, occasionally battling some that weigh 10 to 15 pounds, the largest upwards of 25. On the best days, they elicit seven strikes an hour. But on those rare outings when it’s bitterly cold and a pesky wind angles out of the wrong direction or the bulk of the shad are inactive and clustered on the bottom and the blue catfish are tentative, it’s a struggle to garner three strikes an hour.

Dollahon describes his light-tackle tactics to be an electrifying way to catch blue catfish, but he is quick to note that his understanding of the ways of suspended blue catfish is still in its infancy. For instance, he is yet to test adding a daub of punchbait or a thin sliver of fresh shad to his spoon or jig combo, and he suspects that there are other presentations that might score in the dead of winter. Likewise he’s eager to test his methods at waterways such as Lake Eufaula and Grand Lake in Oklahoma, Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, and Kentucky Lake.

Ned Kehde, Lawrence, Kansas, is one of three In-Fisherman field editors and a longtime contributor on a variety of topics.