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Fishing Stories from Ned Kehde |
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Submitted by Ned Kehde - Nov. 22, 2000 Since the 1970s, the folks at In-Fisherman have exhibited wide and disparate piscatorial interests. What's more, they are passionate about catching big fish of all species. The In-Fisherman staff is said to be the savants about angling for musky, walleye, northern pike and smallmouth bass. And for three decades, In-Fisherman has produced countless I-beams about angling for these four species. Starting in the late 1980s, In-Fisherman became the first magazine and television show to seriously explore the ways of catfishes. Nowadays the In-Fisherman archives constitute the greatest corpus of angling thought and practice anywhere regarding catfish. Hoffman's forte is catching big catfish, and he pursues these titans assiduously and judicially. Eckholm primarily wields a videocamera, but he can also handle a fishing rod as deftly as he can handles a camera. As editor of Catfish In-Sider, Hoffman regularly extols the singular merits of monster flathead catfish, and that's why Hoffman has made several trips to Kansas, which is home of the world record flathead: a 121-pound Goliath. And he has recently become passionate about the surly ways of titanic-sized blue cats that abound in a variety of waterways in Missouri. Then every summer the gigantic channel catfish that inhabit the Red River in Minnesota and Manitoba intrigue Hoffman. During the last two years, Hoffman has shown anglers how to catch big flatheads on the Mississippi River when the water temperature plummets into the 40s and even into the 30s. In addition, Hoffman catches these cool cats on artificial lures. Before 1999 such feats were said to be impossible, and despite scads of photographs and many feet of videotape, some doubting Thomases still contend it can't be done. Before Hoffman's recent flathead revelations, he demonstrated how to catch channel cats through the ice, which was another eyeopener. During their Halloween foray to the Lake of the Ozarks, Hoffman and Eckholm planned to show anglers how to catch big blues in a massive reservoir when the fishing turns trying in the fall. Hoffman and Eckholm began probing the deep coves along the submerged Osage River channel, working from mile-marker 40 to mile-marker 3. They employed heavy-duty Quantum rods and reels spooled with 40-pound Trilene Big Game line, which sported heavy slip sinkers and large Gamakatsu circle hooks. The hooks were baited with chubs, shiners or blood bait. For 36 hours they worked depths of 20 to 40 feet of water, but the blue cats eluded them. Hoffman says that finding blue cats across thousands of acres of deep water is a daunting task, and it's compounded by the many changes in the weather and water during the fall. So Hoffman and Eckholm moved to where the lake becomes smaller and easier to explore. This locale was also graced by a bit of current jetting out of Truman Dam. They also began using panfish fillets for bait, which Eckholm caught nearly at will. These fillets, dripping with blood and amino acids, caught the blue cats' fancy, and straightaway Hoffman tangled with several big blue cats in 25 feet of water, and Eckholm exposed enough videotape for the television show. Then Hoffman and Eckholm fished experimentally with new baits and laid plans for a trip next summer to Clinton, Melvern and Pomona lakes, where they will compose a television show on how David Schmidtlein and Clyde Holscher employ soybean chum to catch a hundred channel cats in a morning. |
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