THE QUEST FOR CHANNEL CATFISH

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BOURNE STRIKES OUT

BY JOEL BOURNE

Sluggish, scum-sucking bottom-feeders or wily, powerful channel cats?

"Come on down to the Chowan," he said. "We'll catch one that'll go 20, heck, maybe 40 pounds." Phil Livesay, a longtime fishing buddy was singing the siren's song over the telephone and it was working like a charm. The Chowan River curls down from Virginia in a wide, tea-colored swath to empty into North Carolina's Albemarle Sound. It's the home of our grail, a fish with the whiskers of a walrus and nearly the same girth: the Chowan River channel cat.

Aesthetes in the angling world may disdain the lowly cat as a dull, sluggish,scum-sucking bottom feeder with a penchant for putrid meat. Some undoubtedly are. But the wily channel cat and its big brothers, the blue and flathead, are the poor man's marlin — fish so agile, so discerning, so powerful, and sometimes just so darned big that they leave other freshwater fish floundering in their wake. The big catfish can grow up to five feet long and weigh more than 130 pounds. One of the most accessible game fish, catfish are the largest family of freshwater fishes endemic to North America, with some 40 species found in the US and Canada. More than 2,200 catfish species haunt rivers and lakes worldwide. And in the frying pan, where the caviar is separated from the fish eggs so to speak, the mild flesh of the channel cat will beat the pants off of a marlin every time.

A few days after our telephone conversation, we were skimming over a light Chowan chop in Phil's 16-foot skiff just off of Perry's Beach, a small clutter of cottages near the hamlet of Colerain, North Carolina. "Most people think that the best way to catch a catfish is to use rancid meat, cat food, or some other stink bait," Phil yelled over the whine of the old Chrysler outboard. "But I've always had the best luck with fresh bait — worms and minnows." The day before, he and his wife Renee had gone worming along a nearby ditch bank, turning over the damp, soft loam with a shovel until they had half-filled a coffee can with red wigglers and soil. Renee, who is smaller than the biggest catfish, but every bit as feisty, has had catfish fever for more than a year now, ever since she hooked a 15-pound channel cat on a six-pound test line and fought it skillfully for 45 minutes before landing it. "When I hooked that fish I thought I had snagged the bottom," Renee says, a wistful look in her eye. "Then the bottom started to move."