Finding perfect fishing hole makes experience catching catfish infinitely better

PIKE COUNTY, Ill. — The road morphs from asphalt to gravel to dirt as it winds between corn fields and through the trees lining the Mississippi River bottoms.

You begin to wonder: Where am I?

At the moment you start to think the directions are wrong and you consider turning back, you navigate a final right-hand curve and see why Josh Thompson takes such an arduous route just to go fishing. It’s an uninterrupted, wide swath of the Mississippi River, where the banks are low and the water tickles your toes if you let it.

There seems to be no brush disrupting the current or causing concern for anglers who don’t want their lines getting tangled. The levee behind the trees protects the nearby crops from flooding and makes this a hidden destination.

“I grew up in Pike County before moving to Springfield, but I never knew of this place. None of my friends did either,” the 35-year-old Thompson said. “We were scouting for places to fish one day and took this dirt road and this is what we’ve found.

“Not many people know about this, and it’s not easy to find. But there’s a reason we keep coming back again and again.”

Thompson reached down and pulled his stringer out of the water.

“Look at these,” he said with three large catfish hanging from the hooks.

Each one measured at least 18 inches.

“These are small in comparison to some we’ve caught,” Thompson said. “It sure seems like every fish we pull is a keeper. We don’t land very many that are small. We release a lot, but we also keep quite a few. They don’t go to waste. We eat every fish we catch.”

Thompson planned a fish fry as part of a family reunion scheduled for late July, which precipitated the recent trip to his favorite fishing hole. And there is nothing better on the menu than catfish in his opinion.

“The flavor and texture gets me,” Thompson said. “If you use the right cornmeal batter and the right oil and the right temperature, it’s going to be a perfect bite. My family loves it, too. We need a lot of fish to feed everybody, so I’ll be finding my way to this spot as often as I can the next few weeks.”

His strategy for catching catfish is simple: Use good bait and be patient.

Thompson is a fan of stink bait, although he doesn’t buy any prepackaged, processed bait. He makes his own. It’s a mixture of rotten chicken livers and gizzards that he pulverizes in a food processor and mixes with crushed crackers to give it some consistency. He also mixes in hot sauce, garlic and beef blood.

“It’s the worst smelling stuff you can imagine when I’m mixing it,” Thompson said.

He’s learned he can’t do that in the kitchen.

“My wife walked in one day and the house smelled awful,” Thompson said. “That was the last time. She made me take the food processor to the garage and buy her a new food processor. She wasn’t going to use that one after rotten livers and gizzards had been in there.

“I told her I’d wash it and clean it good. She wanted none of that. She has a top-of-the-line mixer and food processor now. And I go to the garage whenever it’s time to make stink bait.”

Once everything is pulverized and mixed together, Thompson rolls the stink bait into small balls and stores them in a refrigerator in his garage. He loads a few dozen balls into a cooler when it’s time to go fishing, and that cooler is used for nothing other than transporting stink bait.

“That cooler smells like stink bait and I can’t get the smell out of there,” Thompson said.

He also knows not to leave his stink bait balls out on a counter.

“They look like cookie dough balls,” Thompson said. “I was worried my kids might pick one up and take a bite. That would be an awful bite.”

Not for catfish.

“They gobble them up,” Thompson said.

Even so, it takes time.

“Even around here, where we seem to be catching a lot of fish, you can’t expect to catch something every cast,” Thompson said. “And you have to experiment with the weights. You need to find the right depth.”

Some days, Thompson goes deep, guessing the catfish will be bottom feeding. Others, he uses medium weights to attract swimmers. Once he starts to get bites, he zones in on what’s working and typically lands quite a few.

“All it takes is some patience,” Thompson said. “You know there are fish out there. You just have to find the what and the where. If you do that, you’ll have success.”

Not more than 10 minutes later, he hauled in another 18-inch keeper.

“I’m dialed in right now,” Thompson said. “And boy, this is fun.”

Catching fish always is.