5 expert anglers reveal their secret—and unconventional—tactics for walleye, bass, trout, pike, muskies & channel cats

EXPERT ANGLER: DONOVAN PEARASE

CHANNEL CAT TACTIC: GIVE THEM THE SLIP

Sometimes, you can learn an unconventional tactic by carefully observing other anglers. Such was the case for Donovan Pearase of Blackwater Cats, one of Manitoba’s finest angling outfitters. It was early in his guiding career, and he was watching another guide who had anchored on the rocks below the Lockport Dam on the Red River. “He got out wearing hip waders, while his guests were casting around him,” Pearase recalls. “Every time they would snag up on the rocks, he would walk over and unhook them. He would be standing out of the boat netting fish for them. It was crazy.”

Pearase chuckles when he thinks back to when he first copied the technique, getting right over top of the massive channel cats in the fast, shallow water below the dam. “I was wearing old shoes and jumped into the river. It was about three feet deep,” he says. “I poked around the bottom with my hand, thinking I might be able to noodle out a catfish, but there were no holes for the fish to hide in.”

So instead, Pearase tied a hook to 20 feet of 80-pound nylon tippet material and baited it with a piece of goldeye. He then put on a work glove, wrapped the line around his hand and let it dangle in three feet of water as he sat on a rock, the current washing around him. “Would you believe it? I felt a couple of boom, boom, booms and it was fish on. I wrestled it like it was an alligator in that fast water,” he says of what ended up being a 34-inch, 20-plus-pound Master Angler channel cat. “I held it up like Rocky winning the championship belt, and the whole shoreline exploded with people yelling and cheering. It was such a cool experience.”

Pearse has since adapted the zany technique, using slip bobbers (above) to get right on top of the fish when the bite slows down in the heat of mid-summer—a time when the rule book says the fish get sluggish and go deep. “People can’t believe we throw bobbers in super-shallow water as the primary way to catch catfish,” he says. “The fish have a reputation as being dumb and lazy, eating things off the bottom. But we’ll take big slip bobbers and go up into that really fast water rushing over the ultra-shallow rocks, and absolutely crush big channel cats, one after the other.

Not that Pearase uses the tactic simply to give his clients a unique experience. Often, it’s the only way to put fish in the boat. “It’s such a blast for people who have never done it before—even experienced catfish anglers—to throw bobbers into fast water, over shallow rocks, and have them ripped under,” he says. According to Pearase, the catfish will go after the bait and miss it a couple of times, but then you’ll see their dorsal fins break the surface and the bobber go down. So much for the myth that channel cats are slow, lethargic and sluggish. Says Pearase: “They’re top-end predators.”