Summer drift fishing produces big smiles for fishermen such as Don Coffee. (courtesy of Don Coffee)
The Dog (And Cat) Days of Summer
By Brent Frazee
Drift fishing the flats is great way to catch big summer channel cats.
It’s another hot, steamy day in northeast Kansas, and most fishermen have retreated to the air conditioning.
Not Don Coffee. On a day when the temperature is predicted to soar to near 100 degrees, he backs his boat into the water on Perry Reservoir for another day of hot channel cat fishing.
It’s early, before the sun really starts bearing down. With any luck, he says, he will be off the water with his limit of 10 channel catfish before the weather gets too unbearable. The canopy on the back of his Tracker boat at least provides some shade.
“This is one of my favorite times of the year for channel cat fishing,” Coffee says. “From mid-July on, there are big schools of shad on the flats, and a lot of times, there will be big channels under them.
“They’re scattered. That’s why I like to drift fish on the flats. If you cover enough water, you’ll catch fish.”
Coffee starts this morning the same way he does every summer fishing trip. He arrives at Perry shortly before sunup and immediately goes to work catching his bait for the day.
He tosses out his throw net, and it unfurls in a perfect circle. It lands in a stretch of water where shad are already percolating the surface, and Coffee knows he is in business.
“That’s the key to this kind of fishing,” he says as he lifts a net glistening with silver shad. “You want fresh bait. You can go out here with frozen shad and you’ll hardly get a bite. But they’ll hit the shad you’ve just netted. They can tell the difference.”
On this day, the shad are perfect size. They are 2 to 3 inches long, fresh from this year’s spawn.
Coffee uses a customized drift rig to appeal to the channel cats. He uses a medium-heavy spinning rod and a reel with the drag setting on the bottom for easy adjustment when fighting a big fish.
He likes 25-pound monofilament line, to which he adds an egg sinker about the size of a fingernail and a swivel. He then ties a leader with a hook to the swivel.
“When that weight is bouncing along the bottom, it kicks up silt and gets the fish’s attention,” Coffee says. “Then when those catfish see that bait spinning, it looks like a wounded shad. Plus, channel cats like to spin when they’re fighting. By using that swivel, I avoid line twist.”
It’s a perfect day for drifting the flats. The wind is blowing at 10 miles per hour, just enough to keep his boat moving.
Coffee doesn’t have to wait long for a channel catfish to hit. It bends his spinning rod and immediately starts taking out drag on the reel. After a spirited fight, the whiskered 5-pound fish surrenders, and Coffee pulls it into a landing net. But that’s just the start.
In the next couple of hours, that scene is repeated over and over. Before the sun even gets high, Coffee has his limit of 10 channel catfish destined for the frying pan.
“I like cutting them into strips,” says Coffee, who lives in Topeka, Kansas. “If you trim out that red meat and the fat, these catfish taste great.”
Coffee has enjoyed that meal many times. Kansas is known for its abundant population of channel catfish. It is officially recognized as the Kansas state fish, a native species that thrives everywhere from big reservoirs to small prairie streams.
Though the average channel cat weighs 3 to 5 pounds in Kansas, they grow much larger. The state record is 36.5 pounds caught in 2003 in the Mined Land Wildlife Area. Coffee has landed channel cats in the 20-pound class and believes there are bigger ones out there.
He was brought up in southeast Missouri, where his family fished, hunted and gardened for food for the table. He still remembers learning to fish from a retired schoolteacher who would fish from the bank with a cane pole.
“Miss Duff had an old Cadillac that she treated like a pickup,” Coffee says. “She would go down these dusty backroads and pull over along a pond and fish with a cane pole all day.
“She would always catch fish, even when no one else was. She used to chew snuff. She said her secret was spitting on the bait.”
Coffee went to the military, and when he returned, he traveled back to his hometown to fish with Miss Duff again.
“I had all these fancy lures, and I was going to show her how I could catch fish,” Coffee said. “But she outfished me again, just using that cane pole and a worm.”
Coffee now lives in Kansas, a state he calls “a sportsman’s paradise.” He hunts for everything from rabbits to deer to turkeys and fishes for catfish, crappie and even roughfish.
He chronicles his adventures and shows viewers how to clean and prepare their wild game on his “Don the Outdoorsman” YouTube show.
He is retired now, but he’s still busy. He serves as a pastor at a church, and he is outdoors year-round, fishing and hunting. But he is especially fond of heat-of-the-summer channel cat fishing.
“The nice thing is, these channel cats like warm water,” Coffee says. “They’ll stay active, even after the fishing for other species has slowed down.
“You just have to get out there early, stay hydrated, and drift the flats where big schools of shad are working. You’ll catch ‘em.”
(Brent Frazee is an award-winning writer and photographer from a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. He was the outdoors editor of The Kansas City Star for 36 years before retiring in 2016. He continues to freelance for magazines, newspapers, websites and other outlets.)
