Anyone keeping flathead or blue cats?
- Thread starter Chub_by
- Start date
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I gave away about 10,000 flatheads and blues that I hatched out from eggs salvaged from noodling trips. We may be going again this month. We're trying to get permission to cross a couple of farms to get to the land the catfish stream is located.
Here are a few of the cats from an older trip:
Here are a few of the cats from an older trip:
Noodling involves hand-catching nesting catfish. The streams the group I noodle with are pre-staged with chimney pipes, cinder block caves, and poly barrels to attract the spawning cats. The adults are hand-caught while guarding egg clutches. I salvage the eggs in coolers and hatch them out in commercial-sized egg tumblers.
I kept a small flathead, but do not keep one now. I caught mine with a seine at 8-10". I think I kept it for about 6 months..maybe a little longer. Very cool looking catfish, but was strictly nocturnal. I had a hollowed log in his tank and he sat in there 99% of the time. I had him in a 125 gallon. I fed it worms early in captivity. I think I eventually got him on raw shrimp. The fish did not grow noticeably during the time that I kept him. I gave him to a friend with a pond.
Flatheads are just awesome...wish we had them up here....and also blues lol. Flatheads are listed to be in Canada but I've fished for Cats 25 years in the locations they say they exist...hard to believe they live up here.
Flatheads sound very interesting to me too. I have lived in Michigan my entire live and have never caught or even seen one. We do have a nice run of channel cats in the summer though. They run up out of Lake Huron and average 18"-20". I have kept small channels for extended periods of time but not for many years. The stores in the Detroit area used to stock them regularly which is no longer the case.
Yes Sir....I look forward to the channel cat run every year. I fish Pt. Burwell (Canada) on Lake Erie....incredible size of some we've caught. I did some research after the fact and they said that flatheads live in lake St. Clair and a small distribution in Erie by Detroit. Its still hard for me to believe they exist considering that there is no evidence on any forum about them being here. If there is a population it must be very very small....or maybe extinct.