Neuse River Cats, Shellcrackers and Shooting stars

Made a trip to the Neuse Aug 14,15 with my son and his Friend Tyler for some catfishing on the Neuse River. We launched at a private ramp on the Neuse at aprox 4pm sat and fished until Sunday 4:30 am.

Here is a video of our journey down one creek at about 1/4 throttle.

  The first part of the day was spent fishing for bait. We caught a lot of bream and some very nice shellcrackers on crickets fishing around wood structure , namely cypress trees and blowdowns.
Most were avg size to small which is good in a way as I don't really like to use big bream for bait as they do attract flatheads better but I don't like wasting a a big ole bream. here is a nice shellcracker that my son caught. This shellcracker was released along with all the very nice sized ones we caught. The water temperature in 2 creeks that we fished was a toasty 92 degrees, while the main river was 88 degrees.

Right before dark we started catfishin .  The action was decent dark -12midnight and then it picked up again aprox 2-4.  Here is Tylers first Flathead.

 Here is my sons first of the night at aprox 22lbs

Above is a gar I caught and a 24 lb flattie.

Here is the best cat of the night caught by my son at 34 lbs. Caught on a live bream hooked to a 9/0 hook on 8 inches of leader and held down with a 2 ox weight. You do not want a long leader as they will wrap you around something if you do.

Was a great night. We saw over 20 shooting stars as there is a meteor shower going on this week and heard a lot of owls. Mack

Haw River Float trip July, 6th 2010

August the 6th 2010 Steve and myself made a trip to our favorite river. The Haw. Last night it rained cats and dogs so I postponed our trip from am to pm so we could check out the gauges and other flows on other rivers as I thought the haw would be flooded. It was not. The haw went from a flow of 100 to about 500 and was a little muddy. Mud has never stopped me. Actually I like a little muddy water. We hit the water late in the afternoon and immediatly started catching fish. Almost all on spinnerbaits and most around wood structure and some around rocks. Bait(fry) were everywhere and they were jumping out of the water trying to get away from our baits as they thought the spinnerbait was a fish trying to eat them.

Here is the first fish

Here is Steves best fish of the day. 

And here is a nice bass caught after dark.

This is the spinnerbait I was throwing. It is a 3/8 oz Stanley Wedge spinnerbait.

Today the water Temp in the river was 84 degrees and in one tributary we went up it was 80 degrees.

No doubt made cooler by last nights rain. We caugth a bunch of bass and could of mopped up on some bream and crappie that were chasing the small fry around but all we had was bass tackle. We saw lots of birds including blue herons, little green herons, kingfishers and 1 osprey.