David Magness often has his hands full after spending a day fishing for
blue cats on the Mississippi River. (Photo courtesy of David Magness)
Big River, Big Blue Cats
By Brent Frazee
David Magness’s fascination with the Mississippi River has changed little since he first fished it 45 years ago. He remembers fishing on a sandbar as a youth and catching big blue cats from what seemed like an island in the middle of an expanse of water. Today, his appreciation of the Mississippi hasn’t changed.
Magness, a longtime catfish guide on the river, still marvels at the ever-changing waterway that is home to some monstrous blue cats.
“To me, the Mississippi is one of the wonders of the world. This ol’ river is in my blood,” said Magness, 60, who lives in Hernando, Mississippi. “I think it’s that I can’t control it, change it, tame it. It controls me.
“When you’re fishing for catfish on the Mississippi, you never know what the next bite will be. Your first bite might be a 5-pound fish, your next one might weigh 50 pounds. That’s what keeps me going—trying to figure out ways to consistently catch those big ones.”
Magness has done a good job of that. Guiding on the stretch that runs from Memphis, Tennessee to Helena, Arkansas, he and the customers of his Cat’n Aroun’ Guide Service have caught some huge blue cats. That’s why he is always excited once fall rolls around.
As the water cools, it triggers the big fish to feed. They’ll move out of the swift main channel and go to their feeding holes in slack water.
The deep pools behind wing dikes, the eddies along cut banks, the washouts that produce a point: those are the areas Magness will look.
One other staple of fall helps the fishing: the crop harvest on nearby farms. When the grain terminals along the river starting filling with corn and soybeans, it concentrates the blue cats, Magness said. That can lead to some memorable fishing.
“I’ve caught blue cats 15 miles below a granary, and they’re just full of corn,” Magness said. “They just love to gorge on that grain.”
As opposed to the depth in the main channel, which can run from 20 to 30 feet deep, the holes in the slack water Magness fishes can be deep.
Magness likes to bait his hooks with chunks of skipjack herring and fish them vertically. He will either use the Spot-Lock on his trolling motor or just slowly ease around the deep water until he marks fish on his electronics.
He will use weights as heavy as 24 ounces to get his baits down, then suspends them several turns of the reel above the bottom and places the rods in holders.
“You might wait for an hour without a hit, then have several rods go down at the same time,” he said. “I don’t think the blue cats necessarily school, but they concentrate in the same area.”
Magness likes to use 7-foot 6-inch B‘n’M Silver Cat Elite medium-heavy-action rods with Shimano Tekota 500 Series reels. He uses 80-pound-test braided line with a lighter monofilament leader and Boss Kat 8/0 hooks. He fishes a section of the Mississippi that flows through three states: Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.
He recalls one big fish he caught—a blue cat that weighed 72-1/2 pounds— in the fall. That cat won big-fish honors in a tournament and was transported to the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid store in Memphis to be displayed in its aquarium.
Blue cats of that size are the exception, not the rule. But fish in the 20- to 35-pound range are not uncommon.
“In the fall, we’ll have days when we will catch 20 to 45 fish,” Magness said. “It’s my favorite time to be out there.”
(Brent Frazee is the former outdoors editor for The Kansas City Star who retired in 2016 after 36 years on the job. He has won multiple national and regional awards for his writing and photography. He continues to freelance for magazines, websites and newspapers. He lives on a private lake in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife Jana and two yellow labs, Millie and Maggie.)
