Drift Fishing For Catfish: 9 Essential Tips For Success

welcome back everybody Chad Ferguson here catfish edge.com and this is drift fishing for catfish basics there's a lot of different ways that you can drift fish for catfish and a lot of people call it different names based on technique and even region but it really all kind of boils down to the same thing drift fishing in its most basic form is allowing the wind to move the boat across the water with a drift sock out and dragging baits across the bottom so I'm going to show you the basics of drift fishing for catfish in this video so what I'm doing as I drove through this area fish are kind of scattered out today and I found spit just kind of scattered all through this area we came through here we made a drift we had a couple of real good take downs with some big fish had a couple come off landed one and now we've come back through we're going to drift back through here again so I've just pulled in thrown a drift sock out I've got tied right in the middle of the boat and winds not blowing very hard today we're just going to allow the wind to just kind of move us real slowly back through where I Mark these fish that's rule number one make sure you've got a good drift sock so you can slow your boat down keep the side of the boat into the wind rule number two is make sure you've got a good drift sock to keep the boat slow I know I said that rule number one but speed is key when your drift fishing for catfish if you drift too fast you're not going to catch fish the colder the water is the slower you need to go now what I'm fishing with here this is my Chad Ferguson Signature Series catfish rod from whiskers seeker tackle I've got this rigged with one of the whisker seeker x3 Rattlers I've also got some santi rigs on and I've just kind of mixed those in and I'm fishing with cut shed and using just kind of various size baits I've got some baits like this and then some really big baits that we're throwing out there so what I'm doing I got a couple rods in the water here and I'm just going to kind of spread these baits down the side of the boat I'm going to put about five or six rods out and see if we can't catch a couple of fish it's very important to make sure when you're fishing like this that you're fishing an area that's actually holding fish one of the things that people really do wrong or the mistake they make when they're drift fishing is they just kind of go out and they pick a spot they start drifting now there's great debates all the time between catfish anglers about drifting and fishing on anchor and which one's better and which one's more productive and I tell you that I catch a lot of fish drift fishing there's not the only thing I do I'd like to fish on anchor I like to control drift with the trolling motor there's all kinds of things and techniques that I use but drift fishing is a very productive way to catch catfish and you can cover a lot of water but make sure if you're going to drift fish that you just don't go out and take a place that you think looks good and start drifting you want to I call that drifting blind you want to make sure that you find an area where you're marking fish you've got active feeding fish and that you're drifting through those fish and not just drifting in dead water you should be having activity relatively quickly when you start fishing you're using big baits like I'm using today you should have a little fish pecking at them big fish coming at them all sorts of activity going on so what I've done now I've got six rods out just kind of spread out up and down the boat I've staggered these lines a little bit so every other line I've got out a bit further than the one next to it so I have a short along a short along that kind of prevents some of the tangles or helps to reduce some of the tangles when a fish hits run sideways now I talked a lot about high visibility fishing line I'm using a string catfish monofilament right now and orange really stands out pops real well against the water so you can see it and that's one thing I'd suggest if you're going to fish like this and drift fish for catfish to make sure that you use a good high visibility line especially if you're going to fish for blue cats you can use these techniques for fishing for channels blues all different species of catfish not flatheads so much but I do catch some flat heads drift fishing but if you're going to fish for blue catfish especially bigger blue catfish and drift fish that high visibility fishing line really helps I would say that probably 75% of the big blue cats that we catch if not more never move the tip of the fishing rod just all the sudden you'll see that the lines moved off to the side and just kind of gotten cockeyed all of a sudden or it will go slack or the fish are running at you and if you don't have good high visibility fishing line that you can see moving around real well you're going to miss a lot fish so that's the basics of drift fishing to come up up up up up up up up above this is a pump up a rod subject with a lot of information to cover I've got a ebook on drift fishing if you want to check that goes into a whole lot more detail teaches you everything that you could ever need to know to go out and be successful using these techniques fishing for catfish now go over to catfish edge dr. Homer just click the link in this video and you'll find drift fishing for catfish and that's about it that's the basics of drift fishing to get more tips tricks and information for fishing for catfish head over to catfish acecomm until next time i'm chad ferguson make sure you hit that like button and subscribe to our youtube channel if you haven't done so area that rotting don't break strong deed huh oh god act like you never caught a big catfish before but now o you there we go man it's a surefire man

Channel: Catfish Edge

Views: 76,387

Rating: 4.8425198 out of 5

Keywords: drift fishing, catfish rigs, chad ferguson, catfish edge, catfish, drifting, control drifting, controlled drifting

Id: XYs0RhCr86w

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 19 2015