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Red River at Grand Forks Report


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Ok, thanks for the reply. We'll take it slow and keep away from dam. Like fishing downstream anyways. Never been up there when that shallow but the fish have gotta be piled up in deep main channel holes. Can't wait...kids will have a blast...again. I'm a walleye guy but love Red River catfishing! grin

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Ok, thanks for the reply. We'll take it slow and keep away from dam. Like fishing downstream anyways. Never been up there when that shallow but the fish have gotta be piled up in deep main channel holes. Can't wait...kids will have a blast...again. I'm a walleye guy but love Red River catfishing! grin

I usually run it full throttle to keep the motor up a bit more. Don't overlook the flats. Tuesday the holes were not throwing many fish.

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Fished north Drayton dam on Sunday and found fish pretty tentative with the chilly weather - fished 8:00a-4:00p. We had everything but frogs for bait and from what we heard from others, frogs were working better. We managed to hookup and land about 5 fish under 10#, one 18# and one 20#. Big fish came out of deeper holes using cut sucker.

We also managed to beach our boat in 8" of water in the middle of the river just out from the popular shorefishing spot a mile north of dam. Ha...fun. Son hopped out and into water and was able to push us off fortunately. River bottom was very irregular just about everywhere we went and we had several times where we hit less than 2 feet and had to trim up. Had to pretty much putt along the whole day to avoid shallow spots, timber and debris.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Catfishing is pretty typical for this time of year. Cool nights have brought down the water temperature and made the fishing a bit challenging. The fish are responding by biting a bit different as the day goes on. In the morning they are sitting tight off current near structure and not very active, while in the afternoon as things warm up they move out and start feeding more. The best bite seems to be around sunset to just after dark right now. The best pattern right now is choose a spot and give it a full 20 minutes for the fish to decide to bite. The good news is when they do decide to bite they are slamming the bait. The fish being caught are very robust and healthy so it is well worth the time to head out and fish for them. Many 12-15 pound plus catfish are coming in right now.

Best baits this week are sucker and frog. Frogs have been producing more picking and tugging before commitment while suckers are getting more quick hard bites.

The big news this week is I released my book Cracking the Channel Catfish Code to the public.

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Very cool! Congratulations on the book, Brad! And thanks for the advice a couple weeks back. My buddy and I brought his kids out that way at the end of August and put them on some big cats. They had never caught catfish before so it was awesome to watch them struggle to crank them in. Their eyes were HUGE the first time that big fat cat head came popping up wink

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Very cool! Congratulations on the book, Brad! And thanks for the advice a couple weeks back. My buddy and I brought his kids out that way at the end of August and put them on some big cats. They had never caught catfish before so it was awesome to watch them struggle to crank them in. Their eyes were HUGE the first time that big fat cat head came popping up wink

Thanks

That is what it is all about. That big eyed reaction

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  • Your Responses - Share & Have Fun :)

    • Brianf.
      I'm not there, so I can't tell exactly what's going on but it looks like a large area of open water developed in the last day with all of the heavy snow on the east side of wake em up Narrows. These two photos are from my Ring Camera facing north towards Niles Point.  You can see what happened with all of snow that fell in the last three days, though the open water could have been wind driven. Hard to say. .  
    • SkunkedAgain
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    • LakeofthewoodsMN
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    • CigarGuy
      With the drifting, kind of hard to tell for sure, but I'm guessing about a foot and still lightly snowing. Cook end!
    • PSU
      How much snow did you get on Vermilion? 
    • Mike89
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    • Hookmaster
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    • jim curlee
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