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]catfish is the easiest fish for the first time fisherman,as there is plenty of lakes and rivers full of them.all you need is a good pole and some 20 pound test line and some hooks and weights,then the bait and your fishing .heres a couplle of tips for the new comers or old timers to have.try to take several types of bait with you as they might be finicky some times.also look at where you fish before you through out that line,location of bait is the key as much as type.if your fishing a riverlook for breaks ,bends and runoffsas well as cover in the water you can see .as catfish will feed on the best meal it can get without spending that much of its own energy.,larger baits can and do attract larger fish so dont be skimpy when baitting up.also rigging has a lot to do with the presntation 2 rigs i rely on when catfishing are as follows,1 rivers i use a 3 way swivel and tie light line to bottom and add 2 ounce weight ,add same line as reel for 2 foot leader for second hole in sweviland then add 4ought hook or better , last but not least tie on to main line.now for lakes or pondsit is a lot different setup[ as you dont have the current of a river to contend with,first i take a plain double hole swivel tie 2 ft of the same line you useing to a weight 1ounce will do then thread the swevil onto main linepull up 1 and a half foot the pinch on two split shots half a foot apart in front and behind swivel so it can move but not come all the way down tie 4 or better hook to the very end of your line and you have one leathel fishing rig for cats.good luck and remember if you cant eat it let it go.
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Hey, daymere. Now that I know you reside in Tennesee, I can speak intelligently. I also am retired but am having a tough time convincing myself of that fact.
Anyway, speaking of catfish, I was born and raised in Waco, TX, just about the time the Waco dam was being built and remember a newspaper account regarding a catfish that was founf while driving the pilings. It seems a diver went down to check the positioning and came flying back up, screaming something about a monster. The engineers diverted the water and found a huge catfish had been trapped by the driven pilings, couldn't move back or forward. What had scared the diver was when er looked and saw two big eyes looking at him, eyes spaced about three feet apart. After the water had drained they found a Bluecat, approximately twelve feet long and guessimated its age at over 100 years old, it had been a young one when the Alamo fell.
They tried shooting in the head to kill it, no luck. No bullet at that time would penetrate its skull, just too thick. They finally raised it from the river bottom with a crane and its weight was closely estimated at 1400 pounds. A picture was published in the Waco Tribune and I carried that pix with me for a very long time. The picture was of the diver standing up in its open mouth.
Kind of makes JAWS seem ouny, doesn't it? johnin colorado.
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sure would be nice to get a collection of these big monsters , i saw a newspaper clipping of a giant stergon that washed ashore in the n.w. states some years ago , it showe a line of men standing behind it , headdds and sholders were all you could see behind that fish . i wonder what secrets our great lakes hold !
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And I'd heard about a stergeon that required a tow truck to pull it out of the river in a mid-west state. Water is one frontier that we've only begun to explore. Yes, it does make one wonder. johnincolorado
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i heard of the big cat too , i was begining to think it was an urban , or a "submergan" legend .
i couldn't resist the play on words [crazy] !
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I'm sure there are plenty others that haven't been discovered as yet. Maybe even one to rival the Megaladon. johnincolorado.
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true !
i remember a couple years ago a japanise fishing trawler netted a decaying carcas of an animal about the size of a whale in the pacific , they belived it to be reptillian or anphibian . they dumped it overboard , no money in it for them . scientifically it would have been a treasure .
there's a cave creature in the phillipeanes that is humanoid in stature , only one picture of it is known to exist , it was found in the guys camera next to his body .
vietnam penisula , a pic of a snake that was able to rise 50 feet out of a hole up to a helicopter , scared the heck out of the pilot .
mexico , the chu-ba-cab-ra , ( goat vampire )
south of midway island , the u.s. navy discovered "roars and grunts " with there sonar equipment , no known species of life beleaved to live at thoes debths .
nessy , the lace champlain monster , the giant sloth of the amizon, the coast creature of southern cal . and probably hundreds of others , are they throbacks of an earlier time ? freaks of nature ? new species ?
we can see a billion years plus into outerspace , yet we still have undiscoverd treasures and legends that await some lucky person to gain fame from .
belive it or not , here in michigan " bigfoot " is listed as a protected species .
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In Field & Stream, May 2003, they had an article with a picture of a carp as big as an adult caught in Cambodia in the Mekong River. They say those are normal there and there's catfish that are as big as bears, weighing in over 600 lbs.
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Until I moved to Colorado, I always thought Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, only supposedly lived in the Northwest and the upper states bordering Canada. I recently found out that there have been many sightings in-state, mostly in the southwest regions. According to "eye witnesses", Bigfoot is toothy, roars loud enough to scare a lion and smells worse than a skunk. It supposedly has attempted to kidnap several women over the years, unsuccessfully I might add.
While in the Navy, my ship hit something in 3,000 ft of water, that showed up on sonar and was unidentifiable by normal means. Whales have a distinque sound which is picked up by sonar and would be the only seafaring creature, that we know of, that would be big enough to shake the entire ship, all 553' of her. It later dove out of sonar range, down.
Later on, I read about a "something" that washed ashore on Tasmania. It was 30' across, covered with fur and weighed close to 30 tons. Everyone assumed that it was a land animal, until they discovered the gills. After careful examination, it was declared to have drifted south from colder regions, possibly the Gulf of Alaska or the Bering Sea, maybe even from under the Polar Ice Cap. It was classified as an unknown species.
During WW2, more than one ship was attacked by something big enough to almost swamp a destroyer. It came from the bottom of the sea, somewhere near the Mariana Trench (36,000' and counting). Did depth charges awaken something? Nobody would say, the matter was turned over to Naval Intelligence and classified Top Secret, never to be heard about again.
While trying to discover the origin of the solar system is great, I firmly believe that we should be spending those trillions of dollars exploring the last frontier -- the sea. There have been just too many reports from reliable witnesses about strange and unknown critters breaking the surface. Too many to ignore. There are 7,000 species of ants. How many different species of marine life are there?
The first time I put out to sea, in January of 1964, I looked out and all I could see was water (I'd never seen an ocean before) and commented on it. A seasoned Chief was standing close and said, "yea, and that's just the top of it."
johnin colorado
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yellow river , china , people and farm animals have disapeared , some sightings of giant walking catfish by local farmers are belived to be the cause .
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How about these bad boys from the BFT Wall Of Fame. I wouldn't mind going after a few of these Well's Kats! [center][/center]
the pic was edited for size, the original unedited photo is in the link below.
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i'de like to see the fish fry pan for thoes kittens !
recipe ; put 25 lbs. of shake and bake into cement mixer , toss in two catfish filets , let run for ten minutes , take out the slabs and bake in a pigroaster for three hours !
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we have bigfoot sightings here to but i dont think he is protected?
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shou;d be , just about every states hunting guidline book has a notice posted that states , any animal not listed is to be concidered as a protected species . that includes any undiscovered species .
we have cougers here , i saw two of them before the dnr evere ecknowledged there reexistance in our wilds . had i shot one i would have been arested for killing an endangered species , even thou it was not listed in our hunting manual .
from my personal experiance with bigfoot thou , i can tell you this , don't lend him money , he dosen't have a regular job ! [crazy]
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I have to disagree with you on this one.
he has a good job, as a matter of fact, he cant be fired or even laid off.
his job is to trase around the wilderness and be bairly seen if noticed at all, the only trases he is allowed to leave behind is foot tracks in the snow or ground, but not so many as he can be tracked.
his pay is any thing he can catch for dinner and consume with out leaving any trases that he has eaten. his housing of corse is provided, he may stay any where he can not be found.
and I must say he has excilent tenure in his experteice of being elucive, there for if you see him I will lend you a hundred bucks to lend to him, but I want an autograph in return.[sly]
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[cool]now thats some big cats,havent seen many that big for awhile last one i saw was a 5 ft flathead caught out of a creek in back water 3 years ago.head was almst 3 foot wide ..
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I'm sure they would put up a good fight but in the end you would end up with enough filets to do a block party for a week and a half.[shocked][shocked][shocked]
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well lets get some corn meal and red pepper and ten gallons of oil and fry them bad boys up.
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[

] You would probably need a kettle the size of a small aluminum bass boat to cook them in as well as some pretty good size propane burners underneath just to heat up the boat.
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yea but what a feast it would be.
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