Photo by Ron Sinfelt

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck caught "a cat-fish that was as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over 200 pounds. … It was as big a fish as was ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon."

Monsters that size haven't been seen in recent years, but the Mississippi River still produces big channels, blues and flatheads, especially in the stretch running the length of Arkansas' eastern border from Blytheville south to Eudora.

I should know. I've been fishing for the whiskered warriors that call this river home for almost four decades. I have also fished for catfish in the best rivers and lakes throughout the U.S. and in Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, and I can say without hesitation that no other body of water on the planet surpasses the lower Mississippi River in terms of catfishing action. The Father of Waters produces extraordinary numbers of extraordinarily large catfish year-round, year after year. For the ardent catfish fan, this is hallowed water.

BLUE CATS
The Mississippi River has been churning out giant blue cats for more than 100 years. In November 1879, a 150-pound blue catfish taken in the Mississippi River near St. Louis was sent to the U.S. National Museum by Dr. J.G.W. Steedman, chairman of the Missouri Fish Commission, who found it, and a 144-pound blue, in a St. Louis fish market. It's likely that blues near, perhaps over, the 150-pound mark are still swimming the river today, and I strongly believe one will establish a new rod-and-reel record for the species sometime in the near future.

Several 100-pound-plus blue cats have surfaced in the Mississippi in recent years. The best known of these was the former world record landed in 2001.

On Aug. 3 of that year, Charles Ashley Jr. of Marion was catfishing with two friends on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River at West Memphis. Ashley was fishing with an inexpensive medium-weight spinning combo that he had recently bought at Wal-Mart. He baited with a chunk of Spam, cast it out, let it sink to the bottom and set the hook in a 116-pound, 12-ounce blue cat just minutes later. The next day, I certified his fish as a new Arkansas rod-and-reel record, and later it was certified as an all-tackle world record.

No one in the catfishing community was surprised to hear the new record came from the Mississippi River. But most were be amazed that it was caught on a 100-degree summer afternoon on tackle better suited for bullhead fishing -- and with a chunk of Spam for bait.

My own fishing for Mississippi blues has proven most successful in the area I long ago dubbed "Three Rivers Country." This is the stretch of water in southeast Arkansas where the White and Arkansas rivers join with the Mississippi.

I've tried fishing for blues using many tactics here, and have discovered one that works especially well in summer. From June through August, large schools of skipjack herring often churn the surface of the water at the river junctions as they pursue young-of-the-year shad. This is a highly visible phenomenon, quite similar to the surface-feeding mêlées of stripers and white bass. You can see the fish swirling near the surface, with little shad squirting all about as they try to elude the skipjacks. This activity usually occurs near dawn and dusk.