Went out to do some night fishing for catfish with a friend who had never been catfishing before. Instead of being the teacher I ended up being the person who learned.

Went out there with my typical kentucky/drop shot rigs and cut bait. Coming out from the boat launch we saw a ton of fish stacked up at the point where the log boom ends and the jetty starts. We spent about 20 minutes with no bites. You could hear fish jumping and rising all around us but we couldn't really see them at the time. So I decided to head on up the palouse River towards the pipeline which is where I've always done pretty well.

As soon as we got to the pipeline you could see catfish everywhere in the water rising and jumping. Yes catfish do jump and if you don't believe that this is something that can happen I challenge you to come down here before you lay a comment down. So my friend who had never been fishing for catfish decided to take off the sinker and throw on bobbers. The rest was just purely freaking magic. In addition I should mention that I was using cut bait and he decided to use raw chicken. We ended the night with six fish in the boat and three lost in the netting process and maybe 40 more bites.

Not sure how we can increase our hook sets. I'm pretty sure a lot of these catfish were just living the bite so unless you have your hand on the pole you probably can't increase your hook sets. I would like to add that I could see these things on the depth finder with such clarity and they were stacked and running through in huge groups. While I really hate my lowrance hook 4, I have never seen the clarity and the amount of fish that I did last night.

I can tell you what the toads which is what I think I was hearing all night were hard to drown out in my mind. Leaving that place sure gave me that feeling of quiet. Of course flashing a 1500 lumens headlamp at the rock walls was a bad idea too as I believe I woke up every baby bird in that canyon. The magic of the night was just seeing catfish roaming around trying to suck up all the moths on the water. I even had one come up to my boat and splash my boat soaking me. He was so close if I had the net I could have just reached out and grabbed them.

What didn't work
*Being on bottom
*Cutbait
*Ego

What did work
*Raw chicken
*Bobbers
*Different perspectives

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