Billy Blakely of Reelfoot Lake on Hot-Weather Fishing and September Duck Hunting
Day 3: Blue Bank Resort’s Billy Blakely Discusses Catching Catfish at Night
Editor’s Note: Although temperatures have reached 100 degrees and more each day this month across much of the South and even other sections of the country, the fish at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee are still biting. Billy Blakely, head guide and manager at Blue Bank Resort on Reelfoot Lake, hunts and fishes all year, regardless of weather conditions. This week, Blakely will tell us what he’s catching and how he’s catching them, during the Dog Days of summer.
 Question: Billy, you’ve mentioned that you also catfish at night on Reelfoot and have a lot of success. How do you night-fish for cats?
Blakely: Reelfoot homes a lot of cypress trees out in its waters. The roots of these cypress trees provide good habitat for bugs, worms and other critters that fall off these cypress trees and supply food for catfish. We use Yo-Yo’s, also known as automatic or Mechanical Fishermen. Yo-Yo’s are small, round, sheet-metal devices with a coil spring inside of each one. As you pull the line out of the Yo-Yo, that coil spring becomes tighter. A little latch on the side of the Yo-Yo allows you to pull-out as much string as you want to use at the depth you want to fish. When the spring gets tight, you move that little latch over to hold the strings and the spring in place. When a catfish takes the bait, the weight of the fish trips the little latch, causing the spring to uncoil quickly and set the hook on the cat. As the cat tries to swim away, the spring inside the Yo-Yo gets tighter. When the catfish relaxes, that spring pulls the catfish right back to the base of the tree, where you originally have put-in your bait. Using this device, we can catch a lot of cats, and they can stay alive in the water and not get far from the place where we’ve caught them.
 Question: At what time do you go-out fishing at night for cats, and when do you return?
Blakely: We go out about 5:30 pm or 6:00 pm, when the sun goes down, and the temperature cools down. We come-in about 10:00 pm or 11:00 pm. We catch some good-sized catfish using this technique. We put about 50 Yo-Yo’s out and bait half of those with night crawlers and the other half with the catalpa-flavored Strike King Catfish Dynamite.
Question: How many cats do you catch at night fishing like this?
Blakely: We’ll catch 40 to 60 cats, and they’ll weigh from 200 to 250 pounds total. Most of these catfish will be channel cats, but we’ll occasionally catch a flathead cat.
 Question: What’s the biggest channel cat you’ve caught on Reelfoot?
Blakely: I caught one a few years ago that weighed 21 pounds.
Question: How many cats could you catch, if you stayed out all night?
Blakely: More than you’d want to clean. You probably could catch 300 to 500 pounds or more, if you started fishing at 5:00 pm and came-in at 8:00 am or 9:00 am the next morning.  But after fishing all night, sleeping for a little while and then having to get up and clean all those cats, you’ve taken all the fun out of catfishing.
For more information about fishing or hunting at Reelfoot, you can call Billy Blakely at (877) 258-3226 or visit www.bluebankresort.com. To learn more about Mechanical Fishermen, visit www.rockingaltd.com/mfish.html or call (870) 422-7715. To learn more about catching catfish, go to Night Hawk Publications and order John E. Phillips’ book, “Masters’ Secret of Catfishing,” for $13.50, which includes shipping and handling.
Tomorrow: Reelfoot Lake’s Exciting Bass Fishing in August and Early September with Billy Blakely
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