Catfish went crazy for us at Guasti!
Before I give the story of us catching 32 catfish in a little over 3 hours. (C&R of course) I want to give a disclaimer, we are professionals so your catch rate may be much different then ours. lol (In reality we just got damn lucky)
Let me give a little back ground on catching planted catfish.
There is 2 kinds of fishing for planted catfish. There is the fish for them as soon as their planted catfishing. (also known as Truck chasing) Plus there is fishing for holdover catfish. I do both, so please nobody call me a truck chaser only kinda guy. I fished last month 10 times in a pond that hasn't been stocked since last Sept. I did pretty good all points considered.
This was a fish for the freshly planted kinda trip. At Guasti they do plant catfish every Thursday at noon in the summer months. (they do charge a parking and fishing fee so it is a pay lake) What I found in the last 15 years of pond catfishing is, "there is a percentage of suicidal fish ready to bite right out of the truck." My experience has been about 30% of the plant fall into the suicidal fish category. Once that number has been caught, it get's quiet for awhile. (people mistakenly think they caught all the fish planted) No there still a lot in there but just tougher to catch. They usually go into night time mode, so people have a hard time in catching them. (most lakes don't allow night fishing)
Back to our trip.
We arrived at the usual time (1:00 pm) and much to our surprise there was hardly anyone fishing in the small lake. A couple of newbies and 1 guy who knew what he was doing on the far end of the lake. The whole area of the pond where they stock it was devoid of any anglers. (usually there is about 12 or more people there) That's why I said we got lucky! We had suicidal fish swimming all around us and no one was there to catch them but me and Phil. We had good bait and tackle so it was going to be a slaughter. (not many fish were going to die though)
I was using the ancient Chinese secret on 1 pole (chunky cheese power bait) and a slip bobber with meal worms dipped in Garlic oil on the other. Phil was using fresh Bonito and Shrimp dipped in nothing on his 2 poles. As soon as we cast out, we were bite for the next 3 hours. It was hard to keep 2 poles in the water at the same time. The reason why these catfish were big by pond standards. 2 1/2 to about 5 pounds were the size of these fish and most were 3 pounds or bigger. So you had to net every fish and safely remove the hooks. (mine were easy with 18 treble hooks and the slip bobber fish were mostly hooked in the mouth) Phil did take home a few gut hooked fish for dinner. (I C&R all mine) They were biting so fast and furious I couldn't even sit down for 3 hours. They final stopped biting for us at 4:00 pm. What they did was swim to the other end of the pond. (the other guy started really catching them) We were too tired to move all our stuff the last hour. So I missed 2 bites and caught 1 in the last hour. Phil didn't catch any thing in the last hour.
The final count was me catching 17 catfish and Phil caught 15 catfish. I caught 8 of the catfish on the power bait and 9 on the meal worms on the slip bobber. Phil caught 10 catfish on Bonito and 5 catfish on Shrimp. So it was hard to say what they liked best, but it all worked. I really don't expect to have another day like that this year. But we did start fishing Guasti the same time last year and averaged 15 catfish per trip for the both of us on Thursday afternoons. We always fished 1 to 5 pm because that's what time they close!
Thanks for reading our story.
