
After a drive that truly felt longer than it was ( I could hear my childhood self ask constantly "are we there yet?", we had finally made it to a river I had wanted to fish for a few years now. Folks I knew had fished it before and had done pretty well with steady action and almost always a handful of trophies landed. We couldn't get our lines in the water fast enough. It was a very peaceful morning, clear blue skies with a slight breeze, a dozen pelicans and a few pairs of snow geese flying by over head. I played net boy for the first little while as my wife and Frodo were hammering the drum, they each got one over 24 inches before I could get a line in the water. After about forty five minutes had passed, a few more people showed up to fish the small one hundred foot section of shore we had found and luckily they all seemed decent.
The bites were constant and a lot of the smaller ones were hammering the offerings, we each tried different methods; casting and drifting jigs along the bottom tipped with night crawlers or minnows, bottom rigs, slip float drifting and casting cranks and spoons. A good portion of the landed drum would croak when being handled and released, we then noticed that we could hear some croaking in the water near by.
While casting a Len Thompson 5 of Diamonds, I hooked into and began fighting a really heavy fish, the weight on the end of the line felt like nothing else I had felt so far. After a bit of a fight and a huge head shake, my 17 lbs line snapped and the fish and lure were gone. I tied on another spoon in hopes of another big fish and continued casting with out a bite for over fifteen minutes. I had made up my mind to change lures and on the last cast I got a hit. It didn't feel as heavy, but fought with a lot of strength, going on multiple runs before we saw it. Eventually it showed itself to be a roughly two foot channel cat with the treble of the spoon clearly in its mouth.


After another hour of fishing and a couple handfuls of drum we decided to pack up and try a different spot.
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