Nighttime on the Big Muddy, and everything is moving.
A tugboat, running lights aglow, its three big diesels wheezing to within a few thousand RPMs of redline, strains against the current, pushing a triage of barges, one lashed to another.
Above the tug's pilothouse, a gimbaled spotlight pierces the blackness, scanning shoreline to shoreline, buoy to buoy.
Upstream, prepared to receive the tug, locks swing open; their operator - like the riverboat pilot - is invisible in the night.
Not far away, over rusty tracks, a train clangs south, one car following another and another still, the convoy stretching to all the way back to yesterday.
Amid this, Chris Tuckner anchors his boat, impales a sucker minnow with a 4/0 laser-sharpened hook and tosses the baitfish overboard.
Anchored in his boat 20 yards to port, Tim Deiman prepares a similar delicacy and pays out 50 feet of line, feeling the river bottom with his sinker.
A match is sparked. Someone fires up a stogie.
Welcome to the night.
Welcome to cat fishing.
Tuckner and Deiman have chased catfish a long time. Tuckner grew up in St. Paul but has lived near the Mississippi, in Hastings, many years. Deiman passed his childhood upstream, in St. Paul Park.
The two will tell you that on the three nights a week they spend on the Mississippi, they rarely see other cat fishermen.
"Which is funny," said Tuckner, "because the catfish really has no peer except maybe for muskies.
"And fishing for cats, you don't have to make a thousand casts before you get a hit, like you do muskies."
On a typical night, Tuckner and Deiman push off about 8 p.m. They could go earlier, but it wouldn't do much good. Go later and they might miss a fish or two. So it's 8.
About that time on a recent evening, Tuckner, Deiman, Star Tribune photographer Jerry Holt and I went looking for cats.
Channel or flathead, it didn't matter. Size did. The bigger, the better.
Ask Deiman and Tuckner and they'll tell you cats can be fished with equipment of the toy-store variety. Or proper gear can be used. St. Croix makes a special catfish rod, which these guys use. For line, they like either braided Dacron or Fireline. Their reels are high-tech, fiberglass line-counters.
"A good cat can run off 100 feet of line in no time flat," Tuckner said. "At some point, you've got to bring 'em in against the current. To do that, you need good equipment."
In these enlightened times, it should go without saying that not all catfishermen are toothless river rats devoid of friends, spouses, even dogs. It is true that such people are part of the lore and legend of catfishing, as are packs of Camel straights, plastic containers of cheap tanglefoot and long nights passed on riverbanks watching barges - and life - go by.
But catfishing has seen the future, and Tuckner and Deiman are it. These guys even have jobs(!), specifically in the highly demanding and much-ballyhooed field of technology, about which they can talk all night, if asked.
They also are on the Internet daily, clicking their way through sites such as http://www.walleyeguides.com and http://www.fishtheriver.com, for which Tuckner, as a sideline, is Mississippi River Pool 3 reporter.
Of our bunch, Tuckner was the first to sense action. I say sensed because in catfishing a certain intuitiveness about what is happening on the river bottom, or what might be happening on the river bottom, is required.
Example: A good catfisherman should be able to envision, even though separated from the bottom by millions of cubic feet of dirty water, the telltale individual behaviorisms that signal the presence and in some cases bites of channel and flathead cats.
Channel cats, for instance, whose mouths are smaller than flatheads', might make initial runs of 30 feet or more. Then they stop. And go again. Perhaps faster the second time.
"With their smaller mouths, channel cats have to stop to turn the sucker minnow around so they can swallow it," Deiman said. "Then they make a second run."
Flatheads might never stop once they take the bait. Unless they're made to.
"The state record for channels is 38 pounds," Tuckner said. "For flatheads, it's 70 pounds. Either way, it's a lot of fish. When you set the hook, you've got to be ready."
The fish that had picked up Tuckner's bait made an initial run. Then stopped. And ran again.
Tuckner took a breath, snugged the line tight ... and set the hook.
Nothing.
"Catfish have a lot of cartilage in their mouths, which is why we use the laser-sharpened hooks," he said. "Still, sometimes it doesn't work. You just don't hook up."
Twenty minutes after Tuckner's failed hookup, Deiman had himself a fish.
Though hooked flatheads feel heavier than channel cats because they scoop so much water into their mouths, Deiman didn't know what he had until the fish was alongside the boat, illuminated by the stern light.
As it happened, this also was a channel cat, and not a particularly big one, maybe 12 pounds. But it had struggled mightily, aided by the current, before being netted.
The fish was released.
"You think you know what it might be when you're reeling it in, a channel or a flathead," said Deiman. "But you don't really know until you see it."
Ten minutes later, I was watching my rig, an index finger on my reel, when my spool began reversing itself, sending line into the river.
I waited a good long while. When the line went limp, I slowly brought it taut. In seconds, the fish renewed its run, and I set the hook.
As I did, a tugboat passed, en route upstream. In the darkness, the pilot could not have seen me fight the fish, a channel cat.
Nor could he have seen the fish netted, or seen it held aloft to be photographed.
As tug pilots do, this one was passing his night on the Mississippi weighing currents, judging approaches and slipping into locks.
We, on the other hand, were tying knots, baiting hooks and reaching for big nets.
Same river, two worlds.
My cat wasn't a wall-hanger. But it was a feisty specimen, and fun to tangle with in the dark.
Said Tuckner, "Catfishing on the Mississippi is 99 percent pure boredom and 1 percent pure panic."
Deiman would catch one more cat, a flathead. We didn't weigh it. But had we, the fish would have tipped the scale at 20 pounds or more.
John Milton once asked, "What hath night to do with sleep?"
A point well-taken, particularly by catfishermen. It's not impossible, after all, to sleep one's life away. Or at the very least sleep away a lot of good catfishing.
Our outing, which had begun one day, ended the next. Returning to the landing, we used spotlights to find buoys that marked the proper channels.
Gathering itself, as always, into swift currents, the Mississippi by then was ours alone.
Fishing catfish on the Mississippi
- Experienced anglers typically anchor out of the main channels, well ahead of wingdams. A hooked catfish that is allowed to swim over a wingdam might not be landed.
- A variety of baits are used. Sucker minnows work well, the bigger the better. A variety of "stinkbaits," including raw meat, also are used.
- Weights between 1/2 and 1 ounce often are used, depending on depth of water fished and current strength. Leaders about 3 feet long allow baits to swim freely.
- A catfish's whiskers can't hurt you, but its exposed spines on its back and sides can. Handle with caution.
- The state record flathead catfish weighed 70 pounds. The record channel cat weighed 38 pounds.
- For more information, check out http://www.fishtheriver.com and click on the http:/www.riv-R-atz.com web site.
