Fishing has been tough and the temperatures hot on Lake Gaston this month, says long-time catfish angler Zakk Royce of “Blues Brothers Guide Service” in Gasburg, Virginia. So to beat the heat, he and his girlfriend Jamie and their dog Willow made a night trip August 19th onto the 20,000-acre reservoir on the Virginia-North Carolina border.
“We headed out about sunset, and I ran my 24-foot boat up-lake because they were releasing water out of the reservoir dam,” Royce tells Wired2fish. “I figured the flowing cooler water coming into the lake might turn on fish.”
Royce says the main lake water temperature was 92 degrees. But when he set out 6 baited rods to slow-troll on a main lake river channel drop-off, the water had cooled to 87 degrees.
The drop in water temperature must have been preferred by the lake’s catfish, because just 30 minutes into trolling, a heavy fish hit one Royce’s cut perch baits.
“It took a bait off a deep planer board using a Santee Rig,” said the 36-year-old angler with 10 years’ experience as a Gaston catfish guide. “I fought it with a medium-light action rod, a Penn Fathom 15 reel spooled with 30-pound Berkley mono line and an 80-pound Slime Line leader.”
Royce knew the fish was huge, and he battled it for 20 minutes before drawing it close for Jamie to net.
“The fish was really too big for the net I had with us,” Royce explained. “It was a real adventure getting its head into the net. It was the longest catfish I’ve ever had.”
When Royce got the fish’s head into the net, he helped Jamie wrestle the fish into their boat. They didn’t measure the monster of a cat. But on a good boat scale the fish weighed 108 pounds. It’s the seventh blue cat weighing at 100-pounds that Royce has caught from Lake Gaston. The fish was just a few pounds shy of his biggest cat of 112 pounds caught a couple years ago, also on Gaston.
Royce carefully unhooked the enormous-body catfish, and Jame took a few photos of him and the fish – all under the watchful eyes of Willow, their puppy.
“We didn’t waste time measuring it, we wanted to get it back into the lake fast because it’s so hot and we didn’t want to stress it,” he said.
They released the big cat, then went back to slow trolling deep baits near a main river channel ledge. Before they quit about midnight, they caught-and-released a nice 50-pound blue cat, and a pair of 20-pounders.
Then they headed home for a well-deserved night’s rest.
“I think Gaston is peaking right now for big catfish,” says Royce. “The numbers of blue cats over 80 pounds is excellent – the best I’ve seen since fishing the lake. There also are some channel cats around, and a few flathead catfish.
“But blues are the big ones, and they are definitely available on Lake Gaston now.”
