Jun 27 2009
My Big Catfish from the Dam at Cannelton, Indiana
Oh gosh! I think I was maybe 12 in that picture. Well, I stumbled across it today and I thought I would tell you a little about it. Keep in mind I was 5′1″ then and I’m still the same height.
See that green boat behind me? Yes it really was that small. That was my dad’s little green john boat. We hand-painted the registration number on the side there. It also had the option to be a row boat, but we used the “big” motor on the back. My mom used to go NUTS knowing that me and my dad were fishing in that little green boat just as close to the dam in Cannelton, Indiana as you were allowed to get. The water was usually a little choppy and the boat would rock. It was enough to almost get you to sleep.
One day we were sitting in the river down at the dam in Cannelton, Indiana. Of course we were in the little green boat. There were signs on the walls of the dam that said stay back so many feet. Well, we were back exactly that many feet from both dam walls. We had minnows that we caught out of Millstone Creek on hooks and had our lines weighted down. So, we dropped the lines all the way down until they hit bottom, then brought them up a little bit. And we sat there rocking with the waves about half asleep on a hot summer afternoon.
After a while I stretched a little bit and said, “Dad, I think I oughta check my line to make sure that minnow’s still there.”
He nodded. So, I went to reeling. Or trying to reel anyway. I pulled and it pulled back. So I said, “Dad, I think I got something.”
He pulled up on the line a little bit and there it pulled back again. He said, “Just keep pulling and reeling.”
So, I did. After about a half an hour of pulling and reeling down by the dam in Cannelton, Indiana, it rolled on the surface of the water. It looked to me like it was about as big as I was. I held on to the pole real tight and Dad grabbed the net. He kept trying to get its head in that net but just wouldn’t go. He finally got its tail and half its body in the net and convinced it that it needed to come in the boat with us.
There is sat, the biggest catfish I had ever seen. It was about as long as the boat was wide. We both got excited and had to leave the dam at Cannelton, Indiana right then. We got it back to dad’s and got some pictures of it. I called Mom and told her she had to come see it.
That flat-head catfish weighed about 19 lbs. Later that summer we cause a 22 lb blue catfish. Both of them made some really good catfish steak.
So there you have it, the story of my first big catfish. I caught it just below the dam in Cannelton, Indiana on the Ohio River. Of course, it would be pretty pointless to fish there right now. They’re doing some work trying to make it into a hydro power plant.
I’ll post the recipe for catfish steak at a later date.
