Snake River, WA (Day 1)

My buddy Dalton has a little brother that likes to come out fishing with us every once and a while. He gets frustrated sometimes at the amount of fish I catch compared to him. He extended and invite through Dalton for me to come Cat fishing with them this year, thinking there was no way I was going to out fish him at that. For total catfish I did take 3rd this weekend out of 5 guys.

How this whole operation works is we drove out to Lyon's Ferry Marina and Campground to set up base camp. After sleeping in and getting a good breakfast and maybe even lunch we go out fishing for bait. This is simple and consist of using ultra light spinners with a weight and a worm. Throwing this out in the river you wait for your pole to go wild while you kill a couple beers, throw rocks, and even watch a "wildfire". (It appeared some careless dummy through a cigarette out his window and started the grass on fire 200yds away from us. The bait fish we caught and used were suckers, peamouths, pike minnow, and carp.

Once we had a sufficient amount of bait and then some, we would fillet the fish into various sizes. Paul would say that he liked them the size of his pinkie while Dalton liked his pieces to be about 1.5" x 2". I used whatever piece looked best to me. After dinner we would take our baits and little heavier rods and go to another spot on the snake river. Dalton and I fished from the bank while Paul and Kevin (Dalton's brother) fished from a boat. Using probably a 1 size hook we would hook up are bait and toss it out into the river and wait. Dalton hooked the first 3 cats and I hooked the next three. I did use a little garlic scent on my bait that with the fish count probably did nothing. One thing we did notice is that the cats preferred the peamouth scraps over any other bait.

Part of the fun in cat fishing on the Snake is fishing at night. We would hook up glow sticks to the end of our rods, make a small fire, and then sit and wait.

I want to mention you can catch crappie in the Marina and I set out with a crappie jig and caught a bass my first cast before we ate breakfast. I took it as a good omen.

Summary:
Location: Snake River, near Lyon's Ferry State Park WA (That's all I have been given permission to tell the public)
Time: 12-3pm (bait) 8-12pm (Cat Fish)
Rod: 2-4# spinner with 6# test and 4# leader (bait), 8-12# spinner with 12# test and 10# leader (Cats)
Tackle: Bait - Worms, Cats - Whatever bait you caught
Fish: 15+
Species: Sucker, Bass, Peamouth, Pikeminnow, Channel Cat, Flathead Cat, Bull Head Cat
Biggest Fish: 4# Cat
Smallest Fish: 10" peamouth
Rating: 8.5/10

Sucker Fish

 The Fire

Channel Cat

Bass