When the biting is very slow, try this. Get a nylon sock and stuff it with bait, tie a knot in it and then tie a string to it. Take it out to a good location and toss it in and tie the line off on the shore some place. Wait about an hour and then start fishing around baited area.

One of the biggest questions ask is how to find cats. There are many different ways to find cats but I will go into a couple of ways right now to help find catfish.

Cats are not very picky eaters so knowing there patterns due to body weight and time of day (and year) will increase our chances exponentially, once you nail down these "patterns".
The single greatest determinent of feeding habits is body size! Smaller cats less than 12 inches are pretty much bottom feeders and they focus on aquatic insects and invertibrates to help get them through the growing season. As they get bigger, they become less discriminate.

Time of year is also paramount. Their food source changes during the year. During late winter and early spring this would be winter kill that has been dislodged from thawing ice and has started to decompose on its way to the bottom. Cats gorge themselves on this food source just after ice-out. Late spring into summer the diet changes with what's available. Cats have been found chock full of cottonwood seeds! What does this all have to do with migration? The cats go where there noses tell them to go. Even a lone mulberry tree hanging over a pool in June can be a cat magnet!
Cats are not and never will be "dispersed throughout the stream bottom" but will hang to specific areas that fill their needs of cover, comfort and forage. Once you have learned to identify these areas and what the cats are eating given the specific times of year, you will be in the cats!
Do cats roam from one area to the next? Most assuredly, but if you wanted to eat bees you wouldn't try to catch them as they fly by...you'd want to find the hive.

Cats also love low light periods. Heavy run-off from spring rains that darken the water, huge brushpiles that provide heavy shade where they can lay in ambush, and early and late in the day when the light is just right. Less light=better shot getting a cat.

But when all is said and done, one fact remains. Certain areas will and always do "concentrate" fish! These include riffles (the area at the tail end of a rapid fall into a pool) breaklines in the current, cutbanks (especially ones that hold snags and eddies), rocks, dropoffs at the tail end of sandbars and even up ON the sandbar if it is submerged and the moon is right! Shallows at night should never be underestimated. I guess that the bottom line is diversity, not migration! If you find a stretch of river or a section of impoundment that offers alot of diversity in structure and cover, the more diverse the cover the more attractive it is to cats and the more concentrated the fish will be.

You put some of these idea together and it will give you a better shot of finding those cats.

Hope this will help some people. Good Luck!!!

Over the last few years much has been said about circle hook. One guy will loves them and the next guy hates them. There seems to be no middle ground.

I started using circle hooks last fall and nothing else when going after catfish. You will have to change your old time fishing habits if you use circle hooks. There are things that you can't do with circle hooks and one of the most important is you cannot set the hook. When I say you can't set the hook that is it, no getting around it. All you will do is pull the hook and bait out of the fish's mouth. Let the rod do the work.

When fishing circle hooks use as small a bait as you can get by with. Large bait will slide down and block the point of the hook and will result in no hook up. Baits that work great are lip hooked minnows or bluegill. Leaches are great as are red worms and night crawlers

Some brands of circle hooks that I have tried so far are Daitchi, Mustad Demon, Gamakatsu, and Eagle claw lazer sharp. You will just have to find one that you like.

I hope this will help a little bit