Fishing Adventures

This page will be about some of the catfishing trips me and my buddys have taken.

Santee Cooper, SC.

The first "out-of-State" trip we have taken was to South Carolina to fish the so called #1 catfish lake in the USA. We headed to Santee Cooper on 9/10/02 and fished til 9/12/02. The trip was in high hopes of catching some WILD blue cats which none of us had done....but we soon found out we picked the wrong time of the year for catfishing in this area. They have been in a bad drought conditions all summer and fishing was tough to say the least.When we arrived to the "rediversion" canal the water was very low and looked to be about 8-10ft. lower than normal.This first picture is when we arrived just at sunset...but we soon found out NIGHT fishing at this canal was not a good thing..unless you wanted to be eaten !!!(from left to right Jake, Scott, Jeremy and Duane)

This is a shot Duane took of the sunset on the canal..the perfect spot...great bait we brought from home..we thought we were in for some great cat action? We were warned about the snakes, the fire ants..even the other bugs...but someone forgot something else to keep an eye open for...we soon found out for ourselfs!!

After about an hour with no runs, bites , anything..i spotted something on the surface of the water about 50 yrds out...i got my flashlight to get a better look...there were a pair of gold colored eyes staring back at me..i knew from fishing a lot at my parents house in Florida what it was...GATOR! My buddys didnt fully believe me, so i reeled in one of my rods..bit off the sinker and made a cast past the gator. I reeled in the bait keeping it on the surface sundenly..BAM..the gator had hit it. Now up to this point my biggest gator on rod and reel was about 7ft long and 120 lbs. This gator proved to be MUCH bigger and could have eaten any one of us easy. After a very long hard battle i got the gator to within about 30 yrds of the bank..thats when i got to see just how big he was...easily 10-12 ft. it was a monster and i wanted no more to do with it as it could have been fatal to us if it came up on bank. The line was cut and the gator was free...we soon found out that was not the only one..and the canal was crawling with big gators..we soon called off the first nights cat trip..we would head out at day break and try again on the rediversion canal.