Secrets of successful bank fishing

Lake Tawakoni catfish guide Tony Pennebaker with a couple of many channel catfish he and Luke caught last week while fishing along the bank.

I grew up fishing from the bank of creeks, ponds and small rivers in northeast Texas and southeast Oklahoma. As a kid, our first boat was a little 10-foot wooden craft built by my uncle of what we then called ‘marine plywood’. Even with the benefit of getting out away from the bank, guess where we most often dropped our minnow for bass or occasionally cast one of our few artificial lures or tossed our treble hook baited with pork liver for catfish? You got it, right up next to the bank. There are many reasons for fish relating to the banks of lakes and ponds, cover/structure and food is high on the list. On reservoirs and lakes, shad feed on zooplankton growing on vegetation close to shore and in this shallow water, they also spawn. Fish of all species, both gamefish and non-game fish move shallow to enjoy the smorgasbord of food that is available.

Lake Tawakoni guide Tony Pennebaker also grew up in a rural setting near Lake Tawakoni and cut his fishing teeth fishing from the bank on area ponds and creeks and occasionally on the Sabine River. He learned that he could use live minnows to catch not only catfish but white bass and crappie fishing from the bank at Tawakoni and later when he began concentrating on catching catfish, he learned the areas that are most productive.

This past week, I joined Tony for a few hours of fishing shoreline cover. When I pulled up to Tawakoni Marina, I noticed him casting his Tony P's Punchbait up close to the bank. He had caught 4 good-eating channel catfish in four casts just before I arrived.

"Luke, fishing should be good this morning." Says Tony. White bass just pushed a bunch of shad along the bank right here at the boat house and catfish moved in to partake of the banquet. We are going to concentrate on some of my favorite bank fishing spots but we will be fishing from my comfortable barge rather than driving to the spots and fishing from the bank. We will be fishing the same spots but be casting toward shore rather than from the shoreline."

We motored a few hundred yards from the marina and began fishing a little pocket off the main lake with heavy willows and up shallow, from the shoreline out a few feet, was a heavy stand of water shield, an aquatic plant that baitfish use for cover. With Tony's bait rigged on a #6 treble hook about 18 inches under small floats, we positioned our baits between the willows and grass beds. It didn't take long until we both hauled in a couple of channel catfish apiece. Then, the bite ceased.

"This will be the drill for the morning; we will move along, concentrating on likely spots and hopefully pulling a few fish from each area. This is typical bank fishing and it's much like fishing for bass. Rather than stay in one spot we will stay on the move. Of course, we could pull up on one of the spots I keep baited and fish vertically from the boat and probably limit out on one spot but that's not bank fishing. Let's head over to a shoreline with rock rip rap a bit farther north. It should be good with just enough south wind to stir things up close to the bank and put the catfish on a good bite."

As we rounded the tip of the point we noted a couple of fishermen casting from shore and one of them was bringing in a fish. Making sure not to disturb the guys, Tony positioned the boat a respectable distance and we began placing our baits just out from the rocks. Rocks or broken chunks of concrete placed along the shore for protection from erosion are ideal places to target this time of year. We ‘hop scotched’ along, once the boat was in position we fan cast the shore and usually picked up a few catfish from each spot. We didn't spend over 15 minutes at each spot and when the action slowed, we would move fifty yards or so and repeat the process.

So the morning went. It was fun to be continuously fishing ‘new waters’ and there is just something magical about watching that ‘cork’ disappear under the surface. One never knows the size of the fish until the line is stretched and the fight is on. The majority of fish were channel catfish but Tony connected with one bigger blue cat and at the sight of his rod bending heavily and the guide exclaiming, "He's heading for open water", I knew he had hooked a bigger blue catfish that later made a big contribution to the makings of a mega fish fry.

Chumming from the shore is another very productive method of bank fishing. Cattle range cubes or soured corn is tossed out from shore and it doesn't take long to attract hungry catfish. As Tony pointed out, many bank fishermen bait two or three spots and when the action slows at one, they move on to the next. The shoreline around public boat launches provides great catfish action, especially during the first few hours of daylight each morning. At several of the spots we fished, we observed fishermen that had taken bank fishing to a higher level with several rods set in rod holders; they were setting in comfortable chairs and many of them had stringers of good-eating catfish. A couple of fishermen had launched their fishing kayaks and were paddling just out from shore at a popular boat ramp, casting back toward the bank.

As the old saying goes, "There are many ways to skin a cat (catfish) and fishing from the bank is not only convenient for many people but it can also be very productive. Back at the dock about mid-morning, I had my limit of 25 catfish which equaled 50 very tasty fillets. I had plans the next day to orchestrate a fish fry at my friend Jeff Rice's camp near Yantis while a couple of other friends from Idaho did their best to remove some of the surplus Texas wild hogs they had heard so much about. Our Idaho friends didn't head back north with fresh pork but they did enjoy a good meal of crunch fried catfish fillets. They vowed to join us on their next trip to Texas for round two with the hogs. They did ask if there were any of these good-eating channel catfish in the creek adjacent to my friend's ranch. We might just have a couple of Rocky Mountain trout anglers rigging up for catfish on their next trip to Texas!

Watch "A Sportsman's Life" on Carbon TV www.carbontv.com for a video of the bank fishing trip with Tony Pennebaker. Contact Pennebaker at 903 474 3078.

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