The Best Way to Catch a Catfish

My husband Ray loves fishing. I like fishing too, but not nearly as much as Ray does. If you want to go fishing with Ray so I can work on beads or art or writing instead, please let me know! (Usually I bring a project with me to work on while we wait!)

In this post I will share with you all my best fishing secrets, cute pictures of cats fishing, and a photo of an enormous catfish in a laundry basket. I am by no means an expert, but we do all right.

The Backstory: I started fishing as a young girl, going to Glade Run Lake with my grandpa and Dad and uncles and cousins. It was so fun! I never caught anything, except for maybe the occasional bluegill, and one time my cousin's leg, she did not like that very much!

I've also fished quite a lot at Pymatuning State Park, Morraine State Park, North Park lake, Keystone Lake and several other places around Western PA. I do NOT recommend Mosquito Lake in Ohio, unless you like mosquitos. They literally sell stuffed ones at the park's gift shop!

Most of everything I know about catching catfish comes from Ray. He knew the secrets of fishing in rivers and creeks. We have caught many of them.

While we are by no means at Keith and Tara level, we are pretty good at it around here.

Step 1: Choose a Location

Make sure wherever you are going actually has Catfish. The Pennsylvania state game commission has a resource where you can check what places stock which fish, and I imagine most other states also have this info available online if you do a little digging.

Here's Pennsylvania's Official Resources for Catfish

Step 2: Buy Chicken Livers

This in Western PA can be an adventure all of itself, as most grocery stores have no idea where they actually keep chicken livers in stock.

If you go to Giant Eagle, you can ask at the Meat Department, but a lot of times you'll find them frozen in the frozen foods section near the regular frozen chicken and chicken nuggets.

Step 3: Prepare a Net or Laundry Basket

Catfish are very big and heavy. You are going to need something to catch them in when you get them if you want to make your life easier.

One time while camping on the River's Edge Uniontown KOA (Now known as the Blue Canoe RV Resort in Connellsville, PA), we used a laundry basket because we were ill prepared and it was the only thing I could grab fast. It worked well.

Step 4: Go At Dusk/Night

The catfish are most active at night, so you'll want to head to your location around 7pm to get setup and get started. Make sure you bring flashlights so you can see, Ray likes to wear a headlamp that he can quickly turn on and off.

Step 5: Catch and Release.

This is the fun part - cast your line with chicken livers and wait. You will have catfish in no time!

While you wait, here are some fun things you can do:

• Use Ernie's Method of Catching Fish - Here Fishy, Fishy!
• Coloring Books + Crayons (Yes, its more fun/surprising to see what you create in the dark!)
• Find some frogs + take pictures of them
• Talk about life
• Make an audio recording of the sounds of nature on your phone so you can listen to it in the winter when you can't go fishing and miss it.
• Crochet/Knit - any sort of lap project will do!

There are a couple of things that can be useful for catching catfish, so if you don't have any supplies already, here's what I recommend:

Glow in the dark rod holders - these are fantastic for holding your fishing rod while you wait because it can sometimes take awhile before you get a bite. Glow-in-the dark is important because you don't want to trip on anything!

I also recommend Line Bells - we use on them so we can hear when a fish is caught while we're waiting in the dark. They're useful for all sorts of other things too if you ever need to clip a bell onto something.

Anyways, this is everything I know about how to catch a catfish - although most of my time is usually spent fishing for cats!

This is using the current cat fishing rod we have. It's a cheap piece of junk but the cats enjoy it. It did break almost immediately as soon as we got it, but that's ok. I have plans to invent a better one anyway! The cats DO love the accessories that come with it, especially the green wiggle worm thingy.

And of course, McFloofy enjoys fishing quite a bit himself!

And this is our shower curtain in our house, it looks just like him!

I hope you enjoy my tips and this answers all of your questions about cat fishing. If you have any other questions or have any resources/tips you'd like to share, I would love to hear from you in the comments below!