This waterway doesn’t garner nearly the acclaim of the state’s biggest rivers, but it’s got a catfish population to rival anyplace in the South.
There’s got to be a reason why catfish have the word cat in their name. I think it may have something to do with what they are willing to eat. Have you ever seen a cat eat its own barf? I recently heard from a NICU nurse that she had heard of a cat eating the crusty remains of an umbilical cord that had dried and fallen off of a newborn. I know, pretty gross, but it makes my point because a catfish will eat just about anything too.
Have you seen or, worse yet, smelled some of the concoctions that catfish anglers use to entice their intended targets? I promise you they are just as gross as a crusty umbilical cord.
Of course, we can’t overlook the obvious. Cats have whiskers, and catfish have whiskers. While they may not have the exact same purpose as a cat’s, a catfish’s whiskers are similar because they do serve as a sensory organ that can help them out in a tight spot — namely in finding food when they are hungry.
Think catfish in Louisiana, and the Mississippi River immediately comes to mind with good reason. Those cats are the stuff of legends — some even reported to be big enough to swallow a grown man.
The Red River has also earned a good catfish reputation. The upstream side of Lock & Dam 5 right out from Clark’s Marina has become famous for holding loads of enormous fish that anglers readily snag up.
Positioned between the Mississippi and the Red lies the Ouachita River, a lesser-known catfish hole. In fact, it gets very little catfishing pressure at all, and that’s just all right with the few anglers who know its secrets because they get the action all to themselves.
The Ouachita River is given life high up in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains, and it eventually dumps into the Red River some 600 miles later. Those 600 miles offer some of the fishiest holes in the entire country. But it is the stretch that begins at the Arkansas and Louisiana border and ends at the Red River that holds hoards of virtually untapped cats.
Catfish aren’t managed in Louisiana with as much zeal as the more glamorous species like bass, crappie and chinquapin, but the LDWF does enough sampling to keep an eye on what kind and size cats the Ouachita offers.
“We don’t have any problems with any of the catfish in the river,” said District 2 fisheries biologist Mike Wood. “Of course, sampling them can be tricky because we use hoop nets, and it’s kind of a seasonal thing… we’ve got to wait on the right conditions.”
While flatheads are predominant in the upper section of the river, blues and channel cats can be found just about anywhere an angler can locate a deep hole. Wood said the flatheads can get up to 30 pounds with some blues getting up to 40. The channel cats naturally run smaller. Four or 5 pounds would be considered a big channel cat.
“We don’t see the monsters that you might imagine on the Mississippi River,” Wood said. “There are probably some big ones here. We just don’t see very many. In fact, most of the flatheads probably average about 10 to 12 pounds with a 30-pound fish being a big bonus.”
While the Ouachita offers excellent catfishing opportunities, Wood said it’s an almost untapped resource. Most of the cats are taken in slat traps rather than on a hook and line.
“We’ve got a local fellow that fishes catfish tournaments all over the South,” Wood said. “He tried to get a little organization going here on the river, but for whatever reason, it just didn’t take hold.
“Tightlining catfish just isn’t done much on the river. I’d say that anybody who was interested it in would find a lot of room and a lot of fish.”
Catching cats on the Ouachita is all a matter of timing, according to local catfish expert I.B. Emmons of Ruston. Emmons spends more time plying the waters of Lake D’Arbonne now that he has a camp up there, but he used to be a catfish’s worst nightmare on the Ouachita River.
“You’ve got to adjust where you fish and how you fish with the rise and fall of the river,” he said. “When the river floods out into the bottoms, you have to move into the woods because the main river won’t be fishable. The main river will turn on again once the water gets back within the banks.”
Emmons singled out May and June as the two best months to catfish the river itself because that is typically when the river is falling out from its spring flood level. Catfish that had been scattered and hard to get to now become concentrated and eager to bite.
“You can catch a lot of fish in the backwaters when the river is high,” Emmons said. “But you’ve got to either fish yo-yos or run a trotline someplace where you find some good current running through the woods. Those fish are eating more natural stuff when they’re in the bottoms — stuff like pecan and oak worms or crawfish. A lot of those fish will actually get on the wood and eat the slime off the trees.”
Catfish will move back to the river once the water starts falling. This is when Emmons turns his thoughts to setting trotlines in the river or using a rod and reel. The key is to find the deeper holes with eddy water close by.
“They’ll kind of lay in that slack water and move out to the current to get something to eat,” Emmons said. “Once they get enough, they’ll pull back to the eddy water. The best way to find some fish with a rod and reel is to fish a deep hole for about 15 minutes. If you don’t get bit, pull up and try another spot. If they’re there, you’ll know soon enough.”
When using a rod and reel, Emmons prefers worms or cut bait. He employs a long-shank offset hook when using worms because he can thread a bigger gob of worms on it. If he’s using cut bait, Emmons uses a short-shank Eagle Claw 084F hook. Emmons also uses this hook with chicken livers.
Anglers have had to rely more on cut bait and live bait recently as the catalpa worms and native supply of nightcrawlers has almost dried up. Emmons believes the dry conditions the past couple of years have made it harder to scratch out a box of crawlers.
“We used to get them at the bottom of wet ditches that were covered with leaves,” he said. “You can’t beat free bait. You’ve got to keep those worms cool, though, or they’ll die on you. I’ve also had a lot of success in the river with prepared baits like Magic Bait.”
Emmons said trotlines are productive on the river, too. Lines stretched across the river tend to catch more fish than those set parallel to the river, but the increase of tugboat activity on the Ouachita means that lines across the river are in danger of being cut by the tugs.
“If you put enough weight on them, you could keep them down enough where they’ll be all right,” Emmons said. “But the safest thing to do is string them up parallel to the river on the outside bends. You’ll catch the same size fish but you may not catch as many. The only problem with trotlines on the Ouachita is that the gar and gou are pretty hard on your bait.”
Another technique that Emmons said is great on the river is jug fishing. The best set up is suspending just about any bait you could imagine about 4 feet under a jug, and let a bunch of them go. Jug fishing works best during the hot part of the year because the catfish get off the bottom and hang out pretty shallow in the water column.
While Emmons may focus more on D’Arbonne than the river these days, there is one West Monroe angler that just can’t get enough of the Ouachita River cats. Dennis Sims is widely known in catfishing circles as a hawg hauler on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg. But when he isn’t searching out those giants in deep water, he can be found drift fishing down the Ouachita.
“The Ouachita has a good number of blues and channels,” the past Cabela’s King Cat Classic qualifier said. “Of course, it’s got more channels than blues, and they just don’t get as big as the blues. What a lot of people don’t realize about the Ouachita is that there is an unbelievable number of flatheads in it. They’re in there by the thousands.”
Sims says he can’t point to any one section of the river as being better than the rest because the cats will travel around almost like fish in an aquarium — up one side and down the other — until they find food. All it takes to make catfish happy is food, good oxygen and clean water.
Drift fishing is Sims’ favorite technique on the Ouachita because it allows him to cover a lot of water while watching his depthfinder. He said he actually spots the fish that he’s about to catch on his electronics.
“I find 90 percent of the fish I catch on a depthfinder,” he revealed. “Whereas I’d do more anchoring at the Mississippi because of the current, I drift around more on the Ouachita and use my underwater eyes to actually find the fish. I look hard for fish right on the bottom or at the edge of a drop. Most of the time you can spot them just under the lip of a drop.
“They’re just like us in a sense in that they want to be lazy and have somebody, or something, bring the food to them without having to do too much work.”
Sims employs two three-way swivels with two hook lines when targeting Ouachita catfish. He ties his main line to the top of one of the swivels, and then he ties a drop line that is connected to the top of another swivel. He puts an 18-inch to 2-foot leader line off each swivel with either cut or live bait on the hook. He ties another drop line to the bottom of the second swivel then attaches a 2- to 4-ounce weight, depending on the current and depth.
“I just drop that rig to the bottom on the upcurrent side of my boat and bounce it off the bottom as I drift,” he said. “It’s easy to get the feel of it. Just pick it up a few inches and let it go back down. If it doesn’t hit the bottom pretty quick, you’re going to need to pull off some more line because you just fell off into deeper water, right where a big cat ought to be.”
Sims said anglers wanting to catch fish all day long couldn’t go wrong with cold worms or stink bait. But if you’re looking for quality fish, you can’t beat live or cut bait.
“That’s it, end of story,” he said. “Live or cut bait will catch the bigger fish. If you can find it, skipjack is the best thing to use. You can usually catch some on a Sabiki rig down by the lock at Columbia. That little rig has seven hooks on it, and I’ve caught them as fast as seven at a time around those rocks down there.
“Shad is a close second as far as productivity.”
Sims would rather throw a live skipjack if he can keep one alive long enough. Most of the time, though, he fillets a 6-to 8-inch fish, and uses the entire fillet on one hook.
Sims also revealed that one of his secrets on the Ouachita is to use a whole skipjack head.
While it may not get the catfishing world’s attention like its neighbors to the east and west, the Ouachita River produces enough quality cats that it should attract more anglers than it does.
Folks like Emmons and Sims say that’s just fine with them. They have to chuckle a little when a bass boat races by because they know they’ll get the last laugh and dine later that night on a few Ouachita whiskerfish fillets.
