Catfishing Radio is back with episode 38. This show is sponsored by Brute Outdoors and Team Catfish.

This started out as a brief article on something I observed on the lake and some of the mistakes I commonly see and then grew into much more the more time I spent working on it and thinking about it. The I finally decided I had to do a podcast with it because I was not sure I had covered it all.

It All Started On The Lake

I was at the lake a couple of months ago and after dropping my clients off I decided to go do a little scouting to see what the fish were up to in an area of the lake I had not fished in a while.

I did some driving around watching my sidescan in my Humminbird 1198c looking for fish and found some pretty quickly. There were some shore anglers not to far from my chosen location so I moved down a bit to keep a good respectable distance from them.

I stopped, stuck my DIY shallow water anchors in the mud and decided to grab a quick snack and return a couple of phone calls before I cast my baits out.

While sitting there I was watching these anglers fishing from the shore. They had really long heavy surf rods, probably 10 feet long or more. They were wading out into the water about waist deep and casting these surf rods as far as they could throw them into the middle of the lake.

I finished my phone calls and baited up a mixture of santee rigs and slip sinker rigs with fresh caught shad and started casting my baits up towards the bank. By the time I had my last line in the water I was getting bites and had my first blue catfish in the boat.

I repeated this process of reeling in fish four or five times over the course of the next five to ten minutes and noticed the guys fishing from the shore watching me.

They were paying very close attention to me at that point.

I watched them reel in lines, check baits and continue to wade out and cast as far as they could into the middle of the lake several times over the next little while and during this time I continued to reel in fish.

The whole thing got me thinking.

Why is it that so many shore anglers are so intent on casting baits as far as they can into the lake or river? True, there are some anglers that don't do this but the vast majority seem to be focused on how far they can cast their baits away from the shore.

Through my conversations with shore anglers over the years a common theme is them trying everything they can to get their catfish baits as far as they can throw them from the shore. The further they can get them the happier they are.

The opposite side of the spectrum is that many boat anglers spend the vast majority of their time from a boat fishing right up and around the shore, never fishing the deeper water lairs that hold fish that the shore fishing anglers are often trying to get to. I blame bass fishermen for this problem as anglers see them constantly working shorelines and get into the mindset that they need to be working shorelines for all species of fish.

There are times to fish deep water and times to fish shallow but the truth is that at least one species of catfish can be caught in shallow water all year long. There are certainly times that are better than others but catfish can be caught in water that is five feet deep or less all year long.

Fish Where The Fish Are

The guys fishing from the shore continued watching me and I finally saw them cast their lines left and right of their location into the same general distance from the shore that I had my baits. Within minutes they had a fish on the line and it was the first one I had seen them catch in the time I had been sitting there.

They had been casting over the fish into dead water the entire time they had been sitting there.

If you're fishing from the shore you need to break yourself from the mindset that you have to be as far away from the shore as you can cast, it’s limiting your ability to catch fish. Again, don't