They don’t eat better than mahi, no sir. Live bait or smelly bait or oily bait or bacon or shrimp. They eat most everything. When i was a youngin and ran trot lines with my uncle on the lakes a handful of times, we used ivory soap. True story. The cats would eat the soap but the turtles would leave it alone. Go figure.
Smaller ones taste better of course. If all you want is a fish fry filler, go get you some farm raised fillets. They’re hard to beat.
If you want a trophy picture, there are some monsters lurking around for sure. Big baits at night in the usual spots. I just wouldn’t eat anything over 20-25lbs these days. No reason to. Others might disagree, but to me they don’t taste near as good.
Fishing is better at night, but there’s a lot of dumb things that can happen on the boat at night, and not necessarily by you. You know this, i know this, we all know this, and yet dumb stuff still happens.
Blues are the only ones that can tolerate more than a tiny hint of salt, but flatheads really like the freshwater- but still tidally influenced- portions of rivers like the Edisto and Ashley
Ricky, hardheads and gafftops took a massive hit about 20yrs ago for reasons we may never know. Best guess was some marine catfish disease/virus because other states saw similar almost-disappearances when they were thick as hornets anywhere you tried to fish before that. Nobody really complained, but we don’t know why they’re still not around much at all. Gafftops are still here seasonally but we hardly ever see Ariopsis felis anymore
Capt. John Fuss has a YouTube channel where he is doing a lot of commercial catfishing in the rivers. Deep water, bottom rig, cut bait. I don’t think it’s hard…
This time of year I like the shallows 3.5 to 4 feet… lake moultrie being the spot… whole shrimp on a popping cork… sounds odd but you’ll fill the cooler and more and heck of a lot of fun ask bigT…
We used to target Catfish the first week of June, at Randolph’s in Manning, on Lake Marion. Mind you, this was when their “rooms” resembled dilapidated Army barracks…LOL!
Generally fishing the rip-rap along the dam, using large Shiners as bait.
We also did pretty good drifting the canal, at night, using large pieces of cut Shad, as bait. Most of the heavier fish came from drifting, but you can get a good’un on the large Shiners, too!
We, for the most part, let the larger fish go, and kept the smaller 15# and under for fish fry’s.
I was always told that the bigger fish were for a Catfish Stew, rather than frying up? Not sure why?
I’ve fished those deeper holes from the Dawhoo a few times, yes that’s a great spot. Weve taken my camper and boat down to the bridge and fished out of there a couple times.
We put in at Willtown, since id been up the Dawhoo in the past year or so, and that’s where the guys thought would be the best
Well done chief
Them river catfish are good eating and yall probably saved a lot of bream and redbreast!
I remember doing controlled burns on Jehossee marsh picker
My pap knew the owners well
Tell us more about the gators EF
Is there enough to open the season on them?
Without having to buy a $110 trophy tag
Seems like a DNR racket
I helped rebuilt the trunks on Jehossee around 1980, 81. Put in at Dawhoo on low tide and ride tractor across dike, put in at Grove plantation on high tide and camebup by the house. Caught a good many rockfish in that area in 70s.
