Years ago, no catfish angler worried about fishing in 114 feet of water. Probing depths of 100 feet or more was too difficult to even contemplate. But after Phil King of Corinth, Mississippi, and Stacey Thompson of Paris, Texas, won the 2003 Cabela’s King Kat Classic tournament at lakes Pickwick and Wilson near Sheffield, Alabama, by catching 233.75 pounds of blue catfish in 80 to 90 feet of water, some catfish fishermen began to change the way they fished.
John Jamison of Spring Hill, Kansas, participated in that tournament and was impressed by King and Thompson’s feat. After befriending King and learning about his methods, Jamison returned to Kansas, vowing to expand his tactics. He began by practicing King’s controlled-drifting tactics on the Missouri River and various reservoirs in Kansas and Missouri. He continued to master the techniques of successful tournament anglers, including anchoring, drifting with windsocks, bait-walking, sonar and GPS, and manipulating an electric trolling motor.
Since then, Jamison and Mark Thompson of Williamsburg, Kansas, have won or placed near the top of the leaderboard at several tournaments by using those techniques. Their crowning achievement occurred at the Cabela’s King Kat Classic at Pickwick and Wilson lakes on October 13-14, 2006, when they finished in second place with 14 blue catfish that weighed 490.75 pounds, catching them out of water as deep as 114 feet.
Locating Deep Blues
Four months prior to the tournament, Jamison and Thompson began preparing for the event by studying topographic maps of Wilson and Pickwick lakes, searching for deep-water drop-offs with structural variations along the floor of the lake. The spot where they subsequently caught 490-plus pounds was one of the primary locations that they isolated on the maps.
It was the first place they fished on the first practice day at Wilson, but on that occassion they didn’t get a strike. Disappointed, they decided to work areas that were adjacent to the shoreline, plying 60 to 80 of water along a bluff. For the next two days, they fished deep-water bluff areas, but their catches were paltry.
On the third day of practice, they moved a quarter mile offshore and explored a submerged creek channel in 80 feet of water, catching lots of 5- to 10-pound blue cats. So they revisited the area they’d fished on their first day of practice. As they arrived, a group of large striped bass erupted on the surface, attacking a school of shad. Jamison and Thompson immediately began fishing, with hopes that the blue cats would be foraging on some of the injured shad that striped bass failed to engulf.
Within 20 minutes of slowly trolling across the hump, they released seven blue cats totaling about 250 pounds. Every time they hooked one, they marked the exact location on their GPS, and all of those spots were located along the edge of the hump where it dropped off into 100 feet or more of water. They spent the last days of practice searching other deep-water areas, catching nothing over 30 pounds.
On the first day of the tournament, they returned to the deep-water hump, fishing it for the duration of the event. Twenty-eight of the 30 blues that they caught from this spot during the tournament weighed from 18 to 62 pounds.
