Well, they did answer, and gave a lot of facts. From their answered though, they really don't know about blues over 20 pounds.

 

Loy,

Up in our section of White Rock Creek near Goat Island we have several holes we fish on the channel during late November through April. We have caught several in the 10-20 pound range and have up to 33 pounds. We release the big ones. Up here it seems still steady, but I have fished the river side and was either on or off there. I wonder if silting has anything to do with it?

 

The only factor that changed that correlates with the sudden drop off of rod and reel blues over 20 is the last flood, three maybe four years back. I have many facebook memories of big blues on a near daily bases from three to four years ago. The ones from four are the most consistent. The flood I'm referring to was a little unusual as it muddied the entire lake. All the way to the dam and all coves nothing escaped. Usually the south end and finally Ash Flat Bay, which the area between Memorial Point and More Hill where The Lump is will stay clean as it is off of the river channel. Not that last flood it was really powerful and dumped silt everywhere.
I remember everybody jostling for position in the very last clean enough water to catch white bass on lures. It was the south bank of Memorial point, a flotilla in there everyday until it finally muddied up. And the day before the south end muddied I did well on big cats, and literally the next day the whole lake was muddy and fishing turned off completely for a long time. As the whole lake was muddy for a very long time.
When I go back and try the deep flats I used to do excellent fishing it's very poor. I have tried several of them and they all appear to have changed in the same way on my sonar screen. Loss of definition of contour lines would describe it best. With an apparent thick layer of softer bottom. The hits I get are almost always on step up or down of inches now and the cats do not seem to want to follow a bait any distance from that spot, nit as much as they used to.
I have taken to get getting tighter to structure and major depth changes, but it seems to me a lot of those big cats are just gone.
Hopefully conservation minded cat fishermen will release those ten pounds and over and in the long term future we will have a big crop of big cats.
I say all of this in hope that talking bad about the big cats will motivate them to prove me wrong!

 

I never really targeted big blues.....Daddy was a trot liner at heart in the late 60' s ant thru the70' s. We lived on the North End of the Lake in Jungle Village in the 70's....

I remember Daddy always wanting to catch a big blue. He said they just. Don't get big in Livingston. We caught Op's to 83lb but the biggest blues might go 20 ish.......

Looking back we didn't fish flats, we didn't fish the South end of n water. We fished the north end River Channel, the Jungle it self, and creeks and sloughs on the North End from White Rock creek to up past Riverside.....

I don't remember even seeing and article on drifting for big blues back then.....

Whats the Lake record blue for Livingston?

 

In the late 70’s through the 80’s Lake Livingston was one one of the most heavily trot lined fisheries in the state. I did some commercial fishing up around Sebastopol in those days and morning runnings often were well over 100lbs and it wasn’t unheard of to have 200lb days. I never heard of releasing a blue catfish or an Op until the last few years. I’m not a wildlife biologist so I can’t say if trophy blues have a better gene pool or are simply older? I know the lake fishes differently on the south end but I have caught many Op’s in the 70-88 lb range and blues up to 50 lbs and they have all been relatively shallow. I’m curious if the overpopulation of the smaller fish is leading to the decline in the numbers of big ones. A shocking survey would probably give a better picture of overall health of the fishery but would be difficult in the deeper part of our lake.

 

Its the garfish

 

You might be right 😂😂

 

It takes a very long time for a blue to reach ten pounds, ten years.
And each inch after that represents a lot more bluecat. A 20 pound blue cat is about 12 years old a 50 pound is about 13-15 years old. Really big fish are often twenty years old and some can get older. The world record is 150 pounds.
What I take away from this is that there is a huge population of bluecats who will be a great size for the bulkhead bite.
For big fish I will keep going to catch bull reds and big uglies.
Unless I get another invite to Conroe which does have a lot of big blue cats, no commercial harvest, and with a very small river/creek as it's base it does not get massive floods and huge silt drops.
I do think a lot of the big fish went through the gates during that last flood too.
It may seem impossible to some, but remember the gates open up at 30' deep, that is not that far above the bottom of the lake. And when there is heavy current big blues take advantage and go on feeding frenzies on baitfish that are helpless in strong current.
Chase that baitfish right though the gates when each gate is open near 6' starting at 30' deep when the discharge is 70,000cfs.
The discharge was 70,000cfs for a long time on the last flood. A very long time.
I guided below the dam for many years off and on from the mid 70s to the early 90s and back again many times when the lake was blown out with wind and there was enough water for The Mighty Red-Fin.
More than three times in those years I have seen a huge bluecatfish come tumbling down the slide where the water is discharged and then make it's way to the big stilling basin.
The stilling basin is a huge concrete/rock pool used to catch the discharge and calm it down some before going over the rocks that further break up the flow.
The first time I saw that happen the restricting cable was 190 yards from the water spilling over the rocks on Polk County side and 200 yards on the San Jac side. Then there is the stretch of rocks and then the stilling basin and finally the end of the long slide, so add another 100 yards for the slide, 50 yards for the stilling basin 200 yards for the restricting zone. 350 yards at a minimum.
I used to say those were 25 pound catfish, but if I could see them from 350 yards away that plain there were much bigger I believe.
You can't see what is coming through at 70,000cfs.

 

SS you mention the commercial fishing. I had forgotten about that aspect.

The what other Texas lakes have a commercial fishery?

 

That stilling basin would hold some big blues sometimes. One year there was a drowning down there and they shut the dam off to help us recover the body. Major big fish trapped there for a while. Also about late 90,s you could catch 200 to 300 pounds of blue on trotlines in the lake. Had to persuade Mr Ed into releasing the big ones. He is old school (88 ) and wanted to keep all of them.

 

I don't know Dale, I am positive Toledo Bend has a commercial fishery, but it's a border lake and commercial catfishing is a big deal in LA. They use hoop nets and catch em up!
Gill nets were legal up until I was about in my late 20s I think. I went with a buffalo fisherman on the Neches once, I bought a 50 yard of 4" mesh gill net at the army surplus in Lufkin and gathered up some spark plugs and he showed me how to set it across feeder creek( sandy creek) when the buffalo were spawning.
First time I ran it I had a 14' john boat full of 8# to 20# buffalo. I took them down the road and sold almost everyone of them in 30 minuets. I did take a big one and ate the ribs, they were very good.
Buffalo was the number one selling fish in America for a long time, carp were imported because of the demand for buffalo was great so the thinking was import carp as it was a favorite in the East.
Livingston has a gill net buffalo fishery history, at one time gill nets with big mesh were used by commercial fishermen to clean out the huge buffalo that were present, they were 30 to 50 pounds on the big side and averaged above 20 pounds. After a while there were no more monster buffalos, but hordes of small of ones.
So Texas outlawed gill nets, a good thing too as they catch everything big enough to get caught in the mesh.
A reservoir can hold X amount of bio mass, and it can be in a lot of small ones, or a fewer amount of big ones.
There was an experiment on white bass on Lake Livingston alone. The minimum was raised to 12", but it turns out white bass don't manage very well and soon there was nothing but 9" and 10" white bass in the lake, so they backed it down to 10" minimum again.
So maybe Whsalum is right, we need to get after them bluecats on the bulkhead bite and thin them out lol!
The problem is it takes a 30" catfish to weigh ten pounds on the average, and ten years to grow one that big.

 

I searched and did not find that Conroe was excluded from the state regs, and so I don't know if there is a commercial harvest there or not. I do know they did harvest shad there come to think of it.
It is allowed in Montgomery County and 36 counties in Texas are listed as having commercial catfishing.

 

The state admits there's a silting problem, something we've all talked about for a while. My question to you SS is have you noticed a difference in the depth of the water you normally fish?

 

When I compare the actual depth now in any place on Livingston to the map depth of about ten years ago then there is a 5 to 6 foot difference in some places, maybe more.
I know in 2015 the bend of the river channel closest to Beacon Bay Marina, where the the river comes the closest to The Lump, it was 72' feet deep, and the lake was at 131 or pool level.
Now it's just 62' feet at the deepest. In seven years it filled in ten feet.
The lake has silted in almost ten to twenty feet since impounded 1969 in many places. Old maps show depths of 45 to 55 FOW in many places and now it's 35 feet deep.
I think the flat where I used to do great on winter time cats is 1 to 2 feet shallower in general than seven years ago, especially where the creek bottoms used to show as depth changes and now it's all the same depth.
And then no change in some places, it's those that for some reason trap the heavy silt load when it starts to drop out the water column.
The silt will stay suspended for a long time if the water is cold. If the lake muddies all the way to the dam during winter it really sucks. The water will not clear up until it warms up and the night time ambient temperature is above 50 degrees consistently.
That silt drops in spots where there is current that slows in a bend, or, in a tight channel that quickly that opens up and slows the current.
Such as where creeks enter the river, or, a little channel off the lake, where a sudden rise brings a load of logs/silt and the lake drops slowly leaving all of that debris/silt behind.
I do know the hard ridges and humps still maintain their depths, it's still 24 to 28 on The Lump, 24 to 25 at The Hump, and Prayer Ridge seems to be the same depth as well.