New Fishing Spot "Los Brazos"...

Cathy names all our fishing spots. There's the dogwalker, the wizard, the horseshoe, the elevens and that is all I can think of offhand. Most of those places are either underwater and we can't tie up or the depth is just not right to hold fish as we move into summer catfishing patterns. After a bit of looking around with the electronics we picked a new spot. It had some rolling bottom drop-offs where fish could move from a feeding place to a hiding place and some good solid tie ups. Cathy named this spot "Los Brazos" or "the arm." Maybe you can see why.   

With the underwater structure spotted we threw out a few handfuls of soured maize for chum to concentrate the fish. Fish have to be there and be near to be drawn in. That's why the structure is important. We used our old favorite JPIGGS punch bait and fished about 1pm to 3:30pm. For some reason the last few months that middle afternoon time has been the best. Fish eat when they are hungry but all fish do not eat at the same time. They can't because there is too many of them in the lake. They must take turns and when you find the structure with feeding/hiding places the schools will move in and out as they take their turn at the buffet. This buffet table was located in 35' of water with Cathy finding them 4 cranks from the bottom on her Zebco 606 and me with my smaller Lew's spincast locating them about 15 cranks up in 35' of water. As the afternoon progressed I started just flipping out about 20' of line and taking a few fish as my bait sunk with enough tension to feel a bite on the line. 

Good fillet sized channel cats and we probably threw back a bucket full of undersized blue cats. Sept 1st there will be no size limit on these small cats on Lake Sam Rayburn. Might see me occasionally frying some of these fiddlers whole instead of filleted. 

Actually we went fishing the day before but soon after launch at Cassels Boykin a storm blew up from the big part of the lake south of us and made it impossible to fish deep open water spots exposed to the wind. We tried some of our shallow water slip corking spots that were hot six weeks ago but only caught two fish before we decided it was safer with the boat on the trailer instead of in the water. 

We launched at Jackson Hill for this trip and fished an area we rarely fish to catch these cats and as you can see in the photo of Los Brazos we only caught a sprinkle from the edge of this afternoon storm and were sheltered from high winds. 

Final total was 30 cats. We are a bit behind on the catfish count for the year and are trying to stock up some for grandson Cullen's 1st birthday party fish fry. That did not stop us from inviting our friends the Finans out for fried catfish and hushpuppies with a side salad and a tart lemon meringue pie. The fish were swimming in our bellies about two hours after we got home from the lake.