Altamaha River Catfish Tournament With GON-TV

When GON publisher Steve Burch and I decided to fish as a team in the May 22-23, 1999 Altamaha Park Flathead Catfish Tournament, we knew better than to try to do it alone. We wanted a team with plenty of experience fishing for the big cats with rod-and-reel to fish with us. Several sources pointed to two fishermen from Jesup: Kevin Youmans and Danny Ammons.

As luck would have it, the two are neighbors, and they both agreed to enter the tournament and fish with Steve and I. Kevin has been fishing for Altamaha River flatheads for 10 years. He got Danny started fishing for flatheads with rod-and-reel a few years ago, and one result of that, you may recall, is that in 1997 Danny broke the state record with a 58-lb. flathead, a mark that has since been topped by Paul Duke of Hartwell.

The four of us would fish from GON‘s 30-foot pontoon boat. With an upper and lower deck, triple pontoons and an inboard 260 hp motor, it was not the best boat to take to the Altamaha, but it certainly would make a 27-hour tournament more comfortable for everyone aboard, including GON editor Brad Gill, who came along to film the event for GON-TV.

That’s right: 27 hours. The launch took place at 9 a.m. on Saturday, May 22. The weigh-in took place at noon the next day. There were two divisions: set-lines and rod-and-reel.

Altamaha Park in Glynn County was a busy site on that Saturday morning. In addition to the catfishermen, a 50-boat bass tournament was taking off. Still, we didn’t have a lot of competition in the rod-and-reel division. With 11 teams entered, two of them on our boat, it looked like we had a good chance to be in the money. The set-line division was more crowded, with 24 teams.

The turnout was lower than expected. In fact, there were a dozen or so teams in the park campground that weekend who were planning to enter but saved their money at the last minute. The river was falling faster than usual in that area: two feet in less than a week. Many were predicting tough fishing.

With two-teams’ worth of gear, food, live bait, and tackle aboard the pontoon boat, we set out upriver from Altamaha Park. The limb-liners were scurrying to get their flagged lines on the best limbs, but most were not coming back to bait the lines until dark. Our plan was to start fishing immediately and work to get some flatheads aboard early.

“During the daylight hours, they’ll bite if you put the bait right in the hole with them,” Kevin said, “but if you sit on a hole for 15 or 20 minutes without a bite, you better be moving on.”

We motored along close to deep banks, close to blow-downs and snags, watching the depth finder. When the bottom dropped from 15 or 16 feet into 20 to 25 feet or better, we anchored or tied to a snag and dropped lines into the deepest part of the hole. The flatheads lie up in the brush at the bottom of these holes during the day, and they don’t move around much, but they feed if bait presents itself.

For bait, Steve and I had a tank full of bluegills and shellcrackers from a farm pond, along with a handful of small bullhead catfish that a friend of mine had caught for us. Bullheads, known locally as speckled cats or butter cats, make good flathead bait because they are easy to keep alive and last longer on a hook. Danny and Kevin had a bait tank full of redbreasts. Word on the river is that this spring has seen some of the best fishing for redbreasts in the last six years, so they were not difficult to come by.

One thing I should clarify now, because there is a lot of confusion in this area, is the rule on live bait: there is not one on the Altamaha. Years ago, it was illegal to use a game fish species as live bait. That rule no longer exists. It is absolutely legal to use bream and other game fish, as well as any type of non-game fish, as live bait, according to DNR Law Enforcement. At some reservoirs and at many public fishing areas there are live-bait restrictions, but not on the Altamaha.

Danny and Kevin were both using heavy-duty saltwater rods and big Penn 309 reels spooled with 50-lb. test line. However, their terminal tackle was different. Danny prefers a fish-finder rig with a 3-oz. egg sinker above a barrel swivel, an 18-inch leader and a 6/0 shiner hook. Kevin uses a 3-way swivel. One arm of the swivel is tied to a 2-oz. egg sinker with a 2 1/2-foot length of line. On the other arm he ties a short leader of less than a foot in length to a 12/0 stainless-steel circle hook. This tends to present the bait up off the bottom.

Danny prefers to hook his bait, if it’s a bream, through the back just behind the dorsal fin. Kevin sometimes hooks his bait up through the lower jaw and out the top of the nose. Pond bream do not survive as long in the moving currents as other bait, like redbreasts, but hooking them in the nose keeps them facing into the current. They struggle less this way and survive longer.

David Newman (center) and Mark Presley (right), of Thomaston, entered only the rod-and-reel division of the Altamaha Park flathead tournament, but they caught the biggest fish of the weekend, a 45-lb. flathead on a limb line that they put out just for fun. Paul Tucker (left) fished with the team.

Steve and I went with 3-way rigs, including 2-oz. bank sinkers and 8/0 stainless Mustad circle hooks. We also used bronzed Gamakatsu 6/0 shiner hooks. We were rigged with 50-lb. Trilene Big Game on Daiwa Sealing reels and South Bend Catfish Special rods.

Our first stop of the day was at the upstream end of a series of holes along a steep bluff bank, just a bend or two above the park. We tied up to a snag over 23 feet of water and dropped the lines behind the boat. When 15 minutes had passed without a bite, Kevin got antsy.

“Let’s move,” he said.

We untied and moved downstream 30 yards to another good snag and fished the next hole. This was the pattern for most of the daylight hours.

It was 10:30 a.m. when the first fish hit, on our third drop of the day. Danny saw his rod tip dancing as something began to mouth his redbreast, and he picked up the rod carefully. He tightened down on the line to feel what was going on, and when he was certain the catfish had his bait, he slammed the hook home.

Quickly, he reeled in a 3-lb. flathead. The redbreast was still on the line, just up the leader from the hook and outside the flathead’s mouth, and the first thing I noticed about this catfish was the size of its mouth — it looked too small for the redbreast Danny was using. That confirmed something I had always heard: the biggest bream you can find won’t deter a small flathead.

Ten minutes later in the same spot, the bait clicker on Kevin’s rod started to whine. Kevin picked up the rod and reeled down, but he didn’t set the hook.

“If you use these circle hooks, you’re making a mistake if you try to set the hook hard,” he said later. “If you just tighten the line firmly, it will catch in the corner of their mouth and dig in. If you snatch it, it’ll pop out without hooking him.”

Kevin slowly leaned into the fish. It popped to the top quickly and into the net — a 7-lb. flathead — and there was the circle hook embedded in the fleshy corner of the cat’s mouth.

We were in high spirits. Two flatheads in the boat in 10 minutes, an hour into the tournament, and not even during the best time of the day. In our minds, we began to see coolers and stringers full of flatheads, and big ones, too.

I wish I could report that our visions came to pass. Those two flatheads were the only fish we put in the boat. In fact, Kevin’s 7-pounder was the last fish to bite one of our lines.

Big fish in the set-line division was 31 pounds. It was caught downriver from Altamaha Park by Sammy Cooper (left) and Keith Dills, of Brunswick.

We fished a steep sandbar in the mouth of Smith’s Lake, where the bottom was 28-feet deep. We fished two brush-filled holes just down the bank, where on a summer night last July Danny had boated a 50-pounder, a 30-pounder and a 17-pounder in less than an hour. We fished a deep hole near the power line that cuts through Sansavilla WMA. We fished holes in the vicinity of the new ramp at Williamsburg Landing, on Sansavilla. All without any more luck.

After dark, we watched limb-liners running the banks with spotlights, checking their lines. We talked to several of them, and the report was the same. Most of them had nothing to show.

At sundown, Kevin and Danny always change their approach. They still locate the deep holes, but they present the baits several yards upcurrent from the holes. At night, the flatheads rise from their deep-water lurking places and move up into shallower water to feed. Because they move more at this hour, you can spend more time in one anchor-point without bites before you move on.

One thing that was positive about the situation: the flatheads didn’t bother us while we grilled up our steaks and enjoyed our meal.

At 2 a.m., we gave in. It’s one thing to be exhausted but getting bites. It’s another matter to just be exhausted. With the Q-Beam to guide us, we headed back to Altamaha Park. Danny and Kevin were disgusted with the results, but none of us had any idea that they had already sealed a first-place finish that morning.

With two fish totalling 10 pounds, Danny and Kevin won first place for overall weight and big fish in the rod-and-reel division, for total winnings of $410. Only one other rod-and-reel team weighed in a fish. That was Franklin Howard and J.D. Mason of Brantley County. They had one 3-lb. fish. With no fish, Steve and I tied for third place with nine other teams.

Danny Ammons (left) and Kevin Youmans, who fished on the GON boat, show off their first-place catch in the rod-and-reel division.

The limb-liners had better luck. Fourteen of 24 boats weighed in flatheads, a total of 47 fish weighing 447 pounds. This, for them, was a terrible showing. Partners who were used to thousand-pound nights for one boat did well to come up with one flathead.

Some fishermen blamed the moon, some the tide, but the consensus was the river level: rarely does the Altamaha drop half a foot in a day, as it did over the tournament weekend.

The greatest number of flatheads caught by one team was nine. That team was Johnny Gordon and William Carter of Ludowici, whose nine fish totaled 91 pounds, heavy enough for the $600 total weight prize in the set-line division.